Anne McGuire: I thank my hon. Friend for raising that question. As she will be aware, one of the changes that we will implement—linked to the successful implementation of our pathways to work pilot—relates to the welfare reform proposals. Linked to that are the changes in the personal capability assessment, which will reflect far more accurately some of the issues that disabled people—particularly those who have a mental health condition—and their organisations have raised with us. Organisations and individuals told us, over a consistent period, that they did not feel that the personal capability assessment quite reflected the fluctuating nature of mental health conditions and we worked with those organisations over a number of months to ensure that the new personal capability assessment recognises the issues that are particular to those with fluctuating conditions.

Philip Hammond: I, too, welcome the new Secretary of State to his post and congratulate him and his team of Ministers on their appointments. We look forward to a constructive engagement with them on the many important issues in his in-tray. The Freud report sets out a funding model for extending the reach of welfare-to-work programmes to include hundreds of thousands of people trapped in inactive long-term benefits—not least people with disabilities—by engaging the private and voluntary sectors. Can the Minister tell the House where the new Government stand on the implementation of the Freud report?

Anne McGuire: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question, and I want colleagues to know that I discern a split in the Conservative ranks on the matter. The shadow Minister for Disabled People, the hon. Member for South-West Surrey (Mr. Hunt), said that there were 1,200 questions over 352 pages, which sits at odds with the statistics that we have just heard. We in the Government know that we must simplify benefits application forms, but we should not give the impression that every disabled person applying for a benefit has to answer all the questions that the hon. Gentleman highlighted.
	We can play around with statistics, but the danger is that such a numerical approach may create a fear among disabled people that it is almost impossible to get through the benefits system. In fact, 2.8 million people in Britain claim disability living allowance. We try to make it as easy and as straightforward as possible. We work with organisations that will assist and support individuals claiming the benefit. We offer a form-filling service through the disability and carers service, and we offer a very supportive helpline. Yes, we need to look at simplification, but no, we should not—

Caroline Flint: Well, DLA is not an out-of-work benefit for a start. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks but emphasise that, in the past 10 years, the private and voluntary sectors have been more engaged in supporting people back to work, especially in areas where people have particular challenges, such as disability and child care problems. I have been in the job for only a few days and I am examining the Freud report. He makes interesting points about the way in which we can increase the capacity of the private and voluntary sectors and consider different methods of bearing down on some areas where we can do better. Clearly, we have done well: 900,000 people are off benefits and more people than ever are in work. However, challenges remain and we are up for the task

Caroline Flint: The Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs. McGuire) reminds me that two different benefits are operating. However, I have heard the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller). I am only a few days into the job and I shall examine several matters to ascertain how we can perform better. I am sure that he agrees that some fantastic work is already happening throughout the country to support people with or without disabilities to get back into the workplace.

Mike O'Brien: I have no appointments as yet to meet private-sector pension providers, but I hope to do so in due course. In the meantime, my officials are in contact with the various private-sector providers.

Henry Bellingham: I would also like to welcome the hon. and learned Member to his new ministerial post. Is he aware that I represent a large number of constituents who are members of the Albert Fisher pension scheme and that, even after the Government's changes, they are not going to receive their full pension entitlement? In other words, they will still be short-changed in their retirement. They blame the former Chancellor for the devastation caused to private pensions. Are they right to do so?

David Davis: May I start by welcoming the Home Secretary to her new post, especially in these uniquely difficult circumstances? She has handled this entire affair to date with a calmness and dignity on which I congratulate her.
	I join the Home Secretary in offering the thanks and congratulations of the Opposition to our emergency and security services for their actions in stopping these evil acts, which were planned with the clear aim of taking possibly hundreds of innocent lives. Without the keenly observant eye of one ambulance crew and the rapid response of our police force and bomb disposal crews, we could have been discussing a major tragedy today.
	I wish to single out for praise the civilians who intervened to support the police at Glasgow airport. Without their action in helping to subdue a subject, in circumstances of violence and extreme risk, there might have been a much worse tragedy. In these days, when the word "hero" is bandied around for the most minor of achievements, a real hero is someone who runs towards danger while others run away, and who puts their life at risk to help others. These people did that, and I formally ask the Government to consider recognising their action appropriately.
	All that being said, we have been very, very lucky: only the actions of a few people, fortuitously in the right place at the right time, prevented us from facing more than one major loss of life in the past three days. Today is a day for unity, not for criticism, so I have only two questions—of which I gave the Home Secretary notice over the weekend.
	On 22 April, a newspaper carried a report produced by JTAC that predicted a high risk of an attack at the handover from the previous Prime Minister to the current one. Despite that, the threat level was not raised above severe, which is the level at which it stands most of the time. Why was that, and what were the implications for the police forces and security agencies of that lower level?
	Once alerted to the threat, it is clear that the agencies responded remarkably quickly. Although numerous threats have been foiled, on which they deserve our heartfelt congratulations, we must face the fact that three attempted atrocities have occurred without warning. That means that the Home Secretary will have the difficult task of reviewing the strategy and resourcing of the entire counter-terrorist effort. If that leads to a significant increase in the size of the single intelligence budget, and associated police budgets, in the current comprehensive spending review, that decision will have the Opposition's clear support.
	Over the weekend, the Prime Minister said:
	"The message that's got to come out from the British people is that as one we will not yield, not be intimidated. And we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life".
	We agree. But we should remember that the liberty of the subject is the defining characteristic of the British way of life. So we should not give it up without very good cause indeed.
	I am very pleased that the current Prime Minister and the current Home Secretary have not reacted to this very real threat with hasty or knee-jerk responses. Handling this enemy will take very cool judgment, very careful analysis, and very thorough planning if we are to defeat them without giving up what we all hold dear. This will take a long time, and will need co-operation between the Government and Opposition—a process that has already started.
	Let me conclude by repeating what I said on 7 July 2005. It was true then, and it is true now, and I see the Prime Minister nodding. Whatever the origin and whatever the motive of the terrorism that walks our streets,
	"our response will be the same—the British people will not be cowed and the terrorists will not win."—[ Official Report, 7 July 2005; Vol. 436, c. 466.]

Mark Field: May I associate myself with the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) in relation to the Home Secretary? It must be a tumultuous time to be taking over the post. For my part, I think that she and the Prime Minister have spoken constructively, with a firm eye to the future—we obviously need to look at these things in an entirely different light given some of the mistakes that have been made over the past five or six years on community matters.
	Both Haymarket and Cockspur street lie in my constituency, which also contains many of the country's highest profile terrorist targets, and we must not forget that many residents live cheek by jowl with the embassies and other establishments in central London that are possible targets for car bombers. I appreciate that it is still very early days, but is the Home Secretary giving serious consideration to setting up a ring of steel to protect residents and businesses in the west end similar to that which has operated in the City of London over the past decade and a half?

Jacqui Smith: I thank my right hon. Friend. As my predecessor made clear at the beginning of June, we want to take forward proposals for the counter-terrorism Bill on the basis of consultation. He and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made clear that there might well be a case for examining the amount of time for which we are able to detain people pre-charge so that we ensure that there is the very best opportunity to bring successful convictions. However, if we were to go down that route, we would do so on the basis of consultation, a careful examination of the evidence, and ensuring that there was appropriate scrutiny.

Jacqui Smith: I think that the support from our communities has actually been very positive. Whoever was involved in these attacks—of course, we do not know who that was—I acknowledge that those in our Muslims communities may feel that they are under the spotlight. In fact I was encouraged by the reaction from the Muslim community over the weekend. For example, Khurshid Ahmed, the chair of the British Muslim Forum, expressed
	"support to the Government in raising the threat level",
	and
	"pledged full support and co-operation...in tackling this menace".
	Haras Rafiq, the chair of the Sufi Muslim Council called for communities to
	"make a concerted effort to root out the dregs of society who commit such horrific actions, whose aim is nothing but to terrorise innocent human beings",
	and asserted that
	"such actions have nothing to do with Islam."
	Those are strong positive messages and we need to work with members of the Muslim community who express views like that to isolate the very small minorities in any community who want to propagate hate and terror.

Angus Robertson: At this difficult time, may I commend the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister on their new responsibilities and for the excellent co-operation between the UK Government and the Scottish Government? Since the attack in Glasgow and the attempted attacks in London, nobody should be in any doubt that terrorism is completely unjustified. The Scottish national party and Plaid Cymru join all other parties in condemning the attempts to kill or maim innocent people and undermine our democratic values. In recognising the integral, important and positive role played by the Muslim community in modern Scotland, does the Home Secretary share my appreciation of the strong condemnation across society as a whole of the latest outrages?

Jacqui Smith: I can confirm that the RICU, to which the hon. Gentleman has referred, has been set up. It is in its early days, but it has been set up within the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism. My hon. Friend the Minister for Security, Counter Terrorism and Police, Admiral Sir Alan West and I will take responsibility for security and counter-terrorism. We will push forward on the need to counter the destructive ideology which the hon. Gentleman has rightly mentioned, and on all other elements of our counter-terror work, too.

Eric Illsley: A few months ago, I tabled questions in support of moves by the British Compressed Gases Association to try to restrict illegal sales of gas cylinders, which are usually second-hand sales, particularly on auction sites such as eBay. Unfortunately, such sales are not policed, and the association wanted to tighten the regulations surrounding such sales for a number reasons, including the prevention of the use of such cylinders in terrorist attacks. Will the Home Secretary meet me, any colleagues whom she feels are appropriate and the chief executive of the association to try to move that issue forward?

Jacqui Smith: I am recently enough a business manager not to upset my erstwhile colleagues by making rash statements about when legislation will or will not be introduced. I repeat that it is my intention—as my predecessor as Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (John Reid), announced at the beginning of June—to introduce counter-terrorism legislation later this year, but that will be after a process of consultation and after the Select Committee on Home Affairs and the Joint Committee on Human Rights have had an opportunity to examine our proposals. That will include an ability to share the detail of those proposals with Opposition parties and others. I certainly intend to continue with that commitment by my predecessor.

Robert Wareing: May I first congratulate my right hon. Friend on her appointment? I lived through the terror of the Blitz during the second world war and I remember the stalwart courage of the British people in defying the Nazis. They went about their lives as normally as possible. The current generation of Britons will defy the present terrorists, just as their forebears defied the Luftwaffe's terrorism. The message that the House must convey, primarily to those who are our enemies now, is that we will not tolerate the sort of activities in which they are involved and that we are at one, irrespective of our politics, in opposing them. We will support our people's indomitable spirit in opposing terrorism.

Hilary Benn: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his very kind words about all the people who have worked really hard in response to the emergency, and about my arrival at the Dispatch Box in this new capacity. I look forward to working with him and his colleagues in the spirit that he has offered. I take this opportunity to welcome my new colleagues as part of the DEFRA team, because I look forward to working with them, too.
	We are prepared to consider giving the fire and rescue services a flood rescue duty, if and when full equipment and training are in place—but they contribute enormously already, as I saw for myself in Doncaster on Thursday evening, when I talked to firefighters from that area and to some from Herefordshire and Wales who had come with high-volume pumps to help pump the water out.
	On the question of too many agencies, I have to say that that is not my experience from the meetings and discussions that I have had on every day since I took up post on Thursday. It seems to me that the agencies that need to be there are party to those discussions and, more importantly, are taking action. The system appears to have worked pretty well, and has been well co-ordinated, so I do not recognise the problem that was identified by one chief fire officer.
	The flood centre has been set up in response to the particular circumstances we are facing. I do not yet have an estimate of uninsured losses. As soon as I do, I will provide it to the hon. Gentleman and to the House. On help for those who are not insured, which is a real problem—in one of the streets in a very poor area that I visited on Thursday, it was estimated that some 50 per cent. of households did not have insurances—leaflets have been produced and distributed. Staff from the job centres have been in the rest centres offering advice. Crisis loans are available for those who have left their houses with literally nothing, and there are community care grants. There is £170 million in funding for the latter and a contingency reserve. They are available for people on jobseeker's allowance, income support and pension credit, but there is—as the hon. Gentleman will know—a capital limit.
	The money that will go to local authorities through the Bellwin scheme will depend on the costs that they incur above the threshold, so I cannot give an estimate at this point. On the EU solidarity fund, the rules are that one can apply when the costs exceed either €3 billion or more than 0.8 per cent. of gross national income. I am not aware that we have yet reached that threshold. If we do so, it is something that we would consider.
	The hon. Gentleman asks whether there will be a proper priority for planning new flood defence schemes. Well, a new priority will certainly be given, not least because of the increase in funding that I have announced today, which all hon. Members who have constituencies where flooding is a problem—that includes mine, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out—will welcome. On the building of houses on the flood plain and other places where there is a risk of flooding, planning policy statement 25 clearly states that the Environment Agency must be consulted, and it has the power to ask the Government Office to call in applications where its advice is not being taken. I will indeed undertake to look at how that is being applied.
	Finally, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the flooding may be a consequence of the changing climate with which we all have to deal. I will look at the suggestion that has been made about reports on adaptation, because it is something that we are all going to have to learn to live with.

David Gauke: First, may I congratulate the Exchequer Secretary on her re-appointment to the Front Bench? I had the honour and privilege of serving with the hon. Lady for a number of months on the Treasury Committee and I know that she is a forthright and formidable defender of the Government. Her promotion is well earned and well deserved.
	May I also congratulate, not just because he is here, the new Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Wentworth (John Healey), who until Friday guided the Bill from its earlier stages with much skill, expertise and courtesy, which those of us who are interested in Treasury matters have come to expect? I wish him well in his new role.
	If the Exchequer Secretary will forgive me, I had hoped last week that the hon. Gentleman would continue as Financial Secretary. On the previous two occasions when we debated the Bill, he agreed to amendments, albeit retabled ones, that I proposed. No sooner had I started preparing for this afternoon's debate than I learned that he had again agreed, more or less, to the amendments that I would argue for—the new politics, as the hon. Gentleman suggests from a sedentary position. I do know whether that trend was likely to continue. If it was, that might explain why he has moved. Perhaps we can hope that the Exchequer Secretary will continue in similar vein.
	As the hon. Lady pointed out, the amendments relate to the residual authority that exists within the statistics arrangements created by the Bill relating to matters such as the appointment of the statistics board, directions, the power to authorise disclosure of information, use of information, and orders and regulations relating to the Bill. The Opposition welcome the move and will not oppose the Government's amendments.
	At every stage the Government's position has been that the Treasury is the right place for those residual powers to rest, and at every stage Opposition Members from all parties have argued that that was inappropriate and that it would be right for the Treasury to surrender the powers. Finally, last week—the amendments were tabled on Thursday—the Treasury surrendered the residual rights to the Cabinet Office.
	Hon. Members may speculate about what has changed in the past week and why a Department that has jealously guarded its own powers from other Departments and expanded its own powers into other Departments has changed course. What events in the past seven days could have meant that powers that previously were ultimately in the hands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer are now in the hands, ultimately, of the Prime Minister? We can speculate whether this is part of a general weakening of the powers of the Treasury, or whether the Prime Minister recognised that the enormous powers that have accrued to the Treasury over the past 10 years are not only unhealthy for other Departments, but perhaps not in the best interests of any Prime Minister.
	Perhaps the answer lies in the arguments that were made during the progress of the Bill by many hon. Members. I look back at previous debates and see the contributions in Committee from my hon. Friends the Members for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers), for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) and for Braintree (Mr. Newmark), myself, the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie) and, in particular, the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), all of whom argued that residual power should rest with the Cabinet Office.
	Most persuasive of all were the speeches by a number of Members of the other place, especially Lord Moser, who speaks with great authority as a former director of the Central Statistical Office, and Lord Turnbull, a former Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet and Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, who is an astute observer of the way in which the Government work. Essentially, the same argument has been made by all parties: the Treasury, as a major consumer of statistics, has a conflict of interest in performing the role. There is concern about not only an actual conflict of interest, but the perception of a conflict of interest. In the debate in the House of Lords, Lord Moser said:
	"People will find it harder to accept that we have really gone down the road of independence if a major consumer has responsibility for statistics."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 24 April 2007; Vol. 691, c. 594.]
	He also pointed out that the Cabinet Office provides a good base for co-ordinating Departments—a judgment that he based on his experience.
	The argument that we have heard throughout—indeed, we heard it again today from the Exchequer Secretary—is that the Treasury has a crucial role in co-ordinating the reporting of Government performance and monitoring across Government, as well as being involved in statistics. The hon. Member for Wentworth referred to that point in the Public Bill Committee, where he highlighted the role of Treasury
	"given the significance of statistics in reporting on departmental performance and understanding the levers for successful reform and the development of public services in which the Treasury has inevitably and increasingly taken an important co-ordinating role." ——[Official Report, Statistics and Registration Service Public Bill Committee, 16 January 2007; c. 56.]
	I do not know whether the Treasury will take less of a co-ordinating role in future, but none the less that argument does not outweigh the argument about conflicts of interest.
	The Exchequer Secretary has referred to the strength of feeling in the House of Lords. Whether or not she accepts the argument that the Treasury has a conflict of interest in performing those residual functions, is there any suggestion in the fact that as the Treasury has surrendered those residual powers it will play less of a role in co-ordinating other Departments?
	Finally, the key residual power in the Bill relates to the appointment of members of the board. We have heard a great deal in recent days about an increased role for Parliament in major public appointments. The hon. Member for Wentworth will remember that I asked him in the Public Bill Committee whether at this late stage there might still be a greater place for Parliament in the appointment process for members of the statistics board. I am grateful to the Exchequer Secretary for explaining that the Government and the Treasury accept the purpose behind the Lords amendment. Their lordships' strength of feeling is clear—this is not the only example where their strength of feeling is clear, and I hope that further concessions will be made—but Conservative Members welcome the Government amendments.

Michael Fallon: On behalf of my constituent, Guy Hands, I thank the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) for putting the record straight. I am not sure that Guy Hands thought that he was in any serious danger of being confused with my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), but, if he was, at least the position is now clear.
	I congratulate the Exchequer Secretary and the former Financial Secretary on their appointments. Like every other Member who has spoken, I welcome the Government's change of heart on the issue. I do not think that it was ever a huge issue or that there was any great difference; the Treasury Sub-Committee wrestled with this and came down in the end on the side of the Treasury.
	The change that has been made, though, will assist public perception in two ways. First, the Cabinet Office is clearly closer to the heart of Government and to the Prime Minister. It is where the Office for National Statistics was and where the new statistics board should be—right at the centre of Government. Secondly, the overriding argument for me, although it was a close decision, is that it is not the Treasury. Changing the ONS from being an office appointed and funded by the Treasury to a statistics board that was also appointed and funded by the Treasury would not have been a change at all. By moving it to the Cabinet Office, the Government are, late in the day, demonstrating that it really will be a newly independent body, so it is a very welcome change.
	Like other hon. Members, I am grateful for the support that we have had from their lordships, particularly from Lords Turnbull and Moser—Turnbull and Moser sound rather like outfitters to the Government—in putting the Government straight on this aspect of the Bill. Above all, we should be grateful to the former Financial Secretary. He said at one point in Committee that he did not have a completely closed mind and that he would think about the issue again. If the change is due to his having done so, I hope that he will continue in future weeks to sit on the Treasury Bench when Treasury matters are discussed.

Angela Eagle: First, I thank all those hon. Members who generously welcomed me to the Front Bench. It is always nice to be appointed to the Front Bench, and a little thrill runs down the spine when realising that one is first up on Monday afternoon. It gave me an interesting weekend of reading all the debates that hon. Members held in Committee and in the other place on the important provisions that we are discussing.
	The hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire (Mr. Gauke) said that he would not oppose the Government amendments and that he welcomed the agreement in principle, which, again, is generous. He asked about the implications of the transfer. I agree with the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), who said that we are considering a reasonably finely balanced issue, which the Treasury Sub-Committee examined and about which it came down originally on the side of Treasury. The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) referred to the moment in the late 1980s when the Conservative Government switched the then Central Statistical Office to the Treasury in the first place. The House has therefore considered many such issues in the past. The hon. Lady also said that determining which Department—the Treasury or the Cabinet Office—should be responsible was a fine judgment. Clearly, the Government share that view.
	In reply to the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire, I do not believe that accepting the amendments means conceding the existence of a powerful conflict of interest in the residual ministerial responsibilities for the statistics board resting with the Treasury rather than the Cabinet Office. The most important aspect is that the Bill, the main objectives of which have been widely welcomed, creates an independent statistics board, which can then distance statistics from any perception of interference for political reasons.
	I hope that the hon. Gentleman does not believe that, because the Government have made the concession, they are somehow admitting that Treasury officials are venal and want conflicts of interest, or that the Treasury cannot be entrusted with statistics. That cannot be said of any Department or any Ministers, from whatever party they happen to be. My experience of ministerial office is that statistics are the last thing that we think about because we are too buried in other matters to interfere directly in the way in which a series of statistics are chosen, or when they are compiled and released. Clearly, under the new arrangements, regardless of where residual ministerial responsibilities lie, the new statistics board will perform those duties.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked whether the Treasury would have less of a role in co-ordinating Departments. Removing residual ministerial responsibilities for statistics, which is quite narrow, will not have a bearing on the relative powers of a finance Ministry in any Government. I suspect that that will stay the same and my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary will be doing his best to ensure, particularly as the spending review proceeds, that that remains the case.
	On the third issue, the hon. Member for South-West Hertfordshire asked about board appointments and whether there might be a role for Parliament. Clearly, Parliament will not have an added role and not in respect of the initial board appointments. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the national statistician is a Crown appointment and board appointments will be made by appropriate Ministers—ahead, I believe, of the setting up and going live of the new board in April 2008. A proper appointments process has to be in place for that. It may then be for Parliament to decide—after the non-ministerial department has been established and is up and running—how it wishes to ensure adequate scrutiny of the new department's activities. I know from looking at  Hansard that there were some interesting debates in both Houses and in Committee about how Parliament might most usefully discharge that duty. That, of course, is a matter for this House rather than for the Government to decide.
	The hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) was generous in his welcome, for which I thank him. He was supportive in principle, as were the spokesmen for the other two parties. With that, I hope that the House will accept the amendments.
	 Lords amendment disagreed to.
	 Lords amendments Nos. 2 to 9 disagreed to.

Angela Eagle: I suspect that, with this grouping of amendments, we have come to the nub of the remaining points at issue. The amendments all relate to the important issue of who under the new system should determine the rules relating to how and when statistics are released and early access to official statistics in their final form prior to publication—the so-called pre-release access points.
	There was much discussion of those matters when the Bill was last before the House. I also know from reading the proceedings that a full and robust debate also took place in the other place. It is worth noting that, in both Houses and across all parties, there has been an acceptance of the principal case for pre-release access to continue under the new system. Both Houses have recognised that the principal case for pre-release is widely accepted internationally, although I accept that international practice actually varies considerably. All have accepted that Ministers need to account for the implications of policy areas for which they are democratically responsible at the time of release. That is simply the way and it has become expected that Ministers deal with such issues.
	We have achieved consensus on the view that Ministers need to be fully informed in order to make accurate judgments as to the need and form of any mitigating action that might be required in the light of statistical release—for example, to prevent or manage market disturbances and disruption.
	That however is as far as our common understanding on the issues appears to go. The Opposition accept that pre-release access must continue, but believe that the board should determine the rules and the circumstances in which it is provided. I do not agree with their reasoning on that. We all accept that Ministers require pre-release access and we all understand why they require it. Surely Ministers themselves are the best placed to judge how much pre-release access they require, and under what conditions they require it in order to be fully informed and in a position to act if required in response to a statistical release.

Theresa Villiers: It seems that the Minister herself has been critical of the rules on pre-release arrangements, as she signed up to the report of the sub-Committee of the Treasury Select Committee that called for a very significant restriction on pre-release rules. In the case of certain data, Ministers would be given only three hours' notice under such restrictions. Does she stand by that report?

Angela Eagle: The hon. Lady has done her homework, but not quite well enough. If she had spoken to the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon), he would have told her that I rarely managed to make the sub-Committee meetings, which was a great cause of regret to me. This was because, unfortunately, they clashed with the Labour party's parliamentary committee meetings and, as vice-chair of the party, I had to go and see the Prime Minister every week. I could therefore not attend the meetings of the hon. Gentleman's esteemed sub-Committee. Because I never went up to hear the evidence on this area of work, I was more than happy to sign up to the report, but unhappy to table amendments when I had not heard any of the evidence. Yes, it is technically true that I signed up to the report, but I did so simply because I did not want to be disruptive to the work of the Select Committee and the sub-Committee, which I hold in high esteem. I hope that the hon. Lady will understand that, owing to other commitments, I was never able to—

Angela Eagle: Well, I think that it is important to stress that, when one is on the Treasury Committee, if one cannot get to the sub-Committee meetings, it is disruptive simply not to agree with things, even if one might have disagreements, when one has not heard the evidence— [ Interruption. ] I am explaining to the hon. Lady that, while I was happy to sign up to the sub-Committee's report as a member of the main Committee, I reserved my position on my view of these things.

Angela Eagle: That is absolutely true, but I believe in evidence-based policy making, and as I had, unfortunately, been unable to listen to any of the evidence, I did not feel, even as a full member of the Select Committee, that I wanted to disrupt the important work of the sub-Committee that had been looking into this matter in great detail. If I am being condemned for being a constructive member of the Treasury Committee, rather than a disruptive member, I fear that I must plead guilty.

Angela Eagle: I suspect that these issues have grown to be the way they are because of custom and practice. If the hon. Lady looks at the changes made by my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth, in aligning market and non-market statistics and bringing the time for pre-release for all statistics down from as much as five days to 40.5 hours, she will see that we have made significant progress. I understand that some people wish there to be no pre-release whatever, while others wish it to be only an hour or a couple of hours. That is an issue of the length of time, and the Government have decided that 40.5 hours is an appropriate length of time in this instance. That is a significant improvement on the situation, and I hope that the hon. Lady will welcome that.
	All other aspects of release practices, including those identified in some of the amendments before us, will be for the board alone to determine, rather than for Ministers. For example, it will be for the board to lay down rules and principles relating to the timing and regularity of statistical releases, the way in which statistics must be released and the persons responsible for issuing that release. The importance of that should not be underestimated. Clearly, the perception of ministerial interference in statistics flows partly from the mistaken belief that Ministers intervene in the timing of releases. Under the new system, the board will be responsible for determining rules in relation to release, timing and practices; those will not be determined by Ministers.
	Under the new system, the board will have a statutory duty to assess whether those rules have been complied with. We expect the board, in undertaking that assessment, to examine the conduct and practices of every single person involved in the production and release of any given statistic, and that includes Ministers, press officers, briefing officials and everyone in between. If, in that assessment process, it is found that a Minister or an official had tried to move a scheduled release time, for example, for a political reason, the board would have a duty under the Bill to remove that product's National Statistics accreditation and to report its findings publicly. If that transpired, I expect that the House would also be moved to scrutinise the actions of the Minister or the Department in question. That is transparency, and it would make it almost unimaginable that a Minister would interfere for political reasons, given the consequences that would be likely to follow such interference.
	Despite all that added transparency and the enforceability points that go to the board, and despite the fact the board alone is responsible for determining rules relating to the important issue of release practices, the Government will go further. That is why we have announced that we are committed to the creation of a central publication hub, through which all national statistics will be released under the new system, separating statistical releases from policy commentary. The hub will be an integral part of the overall package of release practice reform, and as with other release practices, the board will be responsible for the development and oversight of the hub and how it works.
	To summarise, the Government remain firmly persuaded that our package of reforms in this crucial area is the right way forward. We have provided for pre-release, and only pre-release, to be reserved for Ministers to determine. That reflects the fact that only they can judge the amount of access and the conditions under which it is granted, such that people are fully informed and in a position to act if required following a statistical release. We will reduce the amount of access from up to five days, as now, to 40.5 hours for all statistics. We will provide in secondary legislation for rules to guide Departments in restricting the number of people who receive access and the number of statistics series to which there is access. We will call on the independent board to establish a central publication hub. Those reforms will result in a tighter, more transparent and more enforceable system. I cannot accept the amendments made in the other place, and I urge the House to disagree with the noble Lords on this matter.

Vincent Cable: I very much echo the comments of the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers). Indeed, we have had a common approach to this crucially important issue, about which we continue to feel strongly, and my colleagues in the other place, particularly Lord Newby, contributed to some of the Lords amendments. This is probably the most important part of the Bill, and the Government's reluctance to give way on this central principle enormously detracts from what is otherwise very good and positive legislation.
	The most crucial and substantive of this long string of amendments is No. 15. It deals with clause 11, which deletes any reference to the board's having competence in the area of pre-release. Also crucial is amendment No. 12, which would apply the code of conduct specifically to the conditions and timing of pre-release. The arguments have been very well rehearsed and the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet has been through them again, so I need not do so. Rather, I shall simply highlight one or two key points.
	The hon. Lady referred to Lord Moser, who is an enormously important and authoritative figure in this field, having established in the 1970s the professional basis for the statistics service in its modern form. He is completely politically impartial and an enormous source of authority on this subject. The hon. Lady touched on some of his comments, and I will quote in a slightly more expanded way his telling comments during the introduction to the debate on amendments tabled in the other place. He said:
	"The way in which the Bill is drafted to deal with this issue is astonishing. Given that these matters are so obviously central to trust and confidence, which is what the Bill is all about, one might have expected it to deal with them positively and helpfully by making them a central responsibility of the new board and central to the code. In fact, almost the opposite emerges."
	That is a pretty devastating indictment from somebody who approaches this issue professionally and without any political axe to grind.
	As the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet said, there are many professionals and other people who approach this issue with the interests of the statistics service and the integrity of government in mind—such as the Statistics Commission, which had oversight of it until very recently—who have argued for no pre-release at all. Indeed, she cited seven countries to which that applies.
	The Minister said in her introduction that we should be pleased that there has been some improvement on the status quo, and it is certainly true that producing some sense of order and reducing at least some of the pre-release to 40 hours is an improvement. However, that should be set against a context in which the quality and standard of pre-release has deteriorated greatly over time. To quote Lord Moser again, he said:
	"It is...sadly true that things have slipped a great deal since 2000, when the last reforms were made...Now they are more lax than anywhere else or than they have ever been before, which...is harmful not only to the statistical world but also to the Government as a whole."
	That is a scathing indictment of how the system operates.
	In the debates in this place, it is now common ground that there are some arguments for pre-release. It is worth going back to the comments in the other place by Lord Turnbull, who approaches the issue not from an ideological point but from the pragmatic view of someone who operated the system of pre-release. He accepts the principle in limited instances. He said:
	"I have defended the principle of pre-release, which I think is consistent with the way we operate ministerial accountability."
	That is the Government's case and the former chief civil servant accepted the Government's fundamental principle. Indeed, most of us do not dispute that basic issue of theology. However, Lord Turnbull continued:
	"Nevertheless I support the central thrust of this group of amendments—that responsibility for this should be given to the Statistics Board, which should settle these matters after consulting with Ministers."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 2 May 2007; Vol. 691, c. 1075-78.]
	He is trying to find a way to reconcile the principle of pre-release with the need to avoid abuse.
	The core issue is that of timing. Most of us have recognised that there is a distinction between different kinds of Government statistics, and there is a particular problem with market-sensitive data. Let us try to be as helpful as possible to the Government and look at other countries that are close to the British system and could be used as a model: the Canadians are often cited as using pre-release. The Canadians allow pre-release of market-sensitive data to officials at 2 pm the previous day, but Ministers are allowed it only at 5 pm the previous day, after markets have closed. There is a recognition that pre-release of market-sensitive data to Ministers must be done under tight conditions. In France, the pre-release time is one hour, as the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet mentioned.
	The key case is the US, because market-sensitive data there have so much more impact on the world economy than anywhere else. There has been a continuing debate about what happens in the US, because the National Statistical Society told us that the US President has only 30 minutes with the data, but the Treasury researched it with the embassy in the US and found that in certain narrow circumstances the President has access the evening before. That is far more restrictive than anything the Government are contemplating in this country. In terms of the amount of time allowed, the Government are being implausibly and unrealistically indulgent.
	In the case of other data, we accept the basic principle of ministerial accountability. Ministers have to be able to explain what has happened on their watch, but that is different from giving them an opportunity to spin and dissimulate. The issue is the length of time, and we tabled amendments suggesting four-hour limits and the Select Committee suggested three hours. We could play with numbers, but what is needed is a professional judgment from the statistics board, and the purpose of the Lords amendments was to ensure that that is where the locus of the decision resides.

Fiona Mactaggart: I wish to speak on this group as it seems the only opportunity to raise an issue that I have consistently raised during the passage of the Bill, which is on what basis does public confidence in our statistical service rest?
	Many Opposition Members who have spoken have suggested that public confidence in our statistical service depends on the way in which statistics are handled by politicians, the pre-release arrangements and so on. That issue is dealt with by this group of amendments. However, I urge the Minister—whom I am glad to see on the Front Bench—to recognise that public confidence is based most strongly on the accuracy of our statistics. I am profoundly concerned that none of the debates on the Bill has focused sufficiently on creating a legal framework that guarantees accuracy.
	The sets of estimates, which might or might not be pre-released—on which this group of amendments is mostly closely focused—and which the Office for National Statistics issues in between censuses, are in many cases profoundly unreliable. The best way to shake public confidence in our statistical service is by producing wrong statistics. The higher education participation rate is not calculated using ONS statistics because of its flawed estimates about the shape of the class structure of our society.
	The grants to local authorities, however, are issued on the basis of those flawed statistics. Members will have heard me describe how my constituency of Slough has been damaged, for example, by the fact that in the 2001 census many migrants to the town did not identify their former address, although it was overseas, and by the smoothing arrangements in the estimation that give towns such as Windsor and Wokingham the same kind of balance of migrants as Slough.
	I am at risk of straying from the issue with which this group of amendments is concerned. However, I urge the Minister, in her new responsibilities, to ensure that the legal framework for delivery of our statistical services guarantees not only their independence but their accuracy at every stage. If we do not make sure that they are accurate, we will not have public confidence in our statistics.

Stewart Hosie: On 13 March, at column 217, the then Financial Secretary, the hon. Member for Wentworth (John Healey), said about pre-release arrangements:
	"The public have a right to expect, and the British media have come to demand, that Government Ministers account for the impact and implications of policy when statistics are released—not hours afterwards or in the days that follow."—[ Official Report, 13 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 217.]
	I happen to agree entirely. But the simple fact that a Minister or Department is obliged to comment quickly after the release of a statistical series does not and should never entitle them to access to it for some hours—or almost two days—in advance.
	I shall speak briefly, but I hope that I can get to the nub of the issue. To paraphrase the new Minister, she said early in her contribution that because Ministers have to deal with the consequences of the publication of data, or perhaps provide mitigation if something happens, that makes them the people best placed to set the time scales. Nothing could be further from the truth. It may suit them to set the time scales, because, as the previous Financial Secretary said, they will have to respond quickly, so they need a lot of time to work out what they will say, but that is completely back to front. It might suit them if they are going to spin a narrow part of the statistics that look beneficial and can cover a multitude of sins elsewhere in the small print of a document. It might suit them if they want to discount the bad news early, knowing that another announcement is to come the following day or the day after that will cover it up. But if the Minister is serious about transparency and if she and the Department are serious about removing perceptions of spin and cover-up, I have yet to hear an argument today as to why the Government will not hand over the responsibility for the code and the creation of time scales to the national statistician or the independent board.
	The Minister in her opening remarks said that there was broad agreement on both sides of the House that, in the case of market sensitive data, there was general agreement that there should be proper pre-release. That is right and proper. But for the normal publication of normal social statistics on non-market sensitive economic data, if the Government are serious about transparency, there is no longer any justification for the Government to keep even 40.5 hours of pre-release access to themselves. Therefore, I ask them to look at the matter.
	I know that the Minister is new, and I am sure that she has been studying the previous debates in  Hansard and reading through briefings by the ton, but this is, as she said earlier, the main point of contention in the Bill. Why do we not go collectively, in the big tent consensual politics, with a new progressive consensus, forward together—and other catch phrases that I cannot quite remember—to deliver the transparency that the House wants, including, I am sure, many Labour Back Benchers, and that the people expect and the users of statistics demand to remove the perception of fiddling, unnecessary spin and discounting of bad news when statistics are published?

Madam Deputy Speaker: With this we may discuss Lords amendments Nos. 16 to 19 and Nos.31 and 39, and amendments thereto.

Theresa Villiers: We very much welcome the Government's change of heart on the issues covered by this group of amendments. Although the amendments do not go as far as we would like, they represent a significant change to the scope of the Bill and the impact of the code of practice. In essence, our arguments on the code and the distinction between national and official statistics—those issues are at the heart of the amendments—have been simple and threefold.
	First, the two-tier distinction between the two types of Government statistics is unnecessary and confusing and could undermine confidence in official figures outside the scope of national statistics. Secondly, if it is worth producing a Government statistic on an issue, it is worth producing it according to the standards of integrity and impartiality set out in the code. There is no reason to believe that the board cannot be trusted to come up with a proportionate and workable approach to the enforcement of the code across the range of different Government statistical activities. Thirdly, to leave Ministers to determine whether the code and the scrutiny of the board apply to their departmental statistics undermines the credibility of the reforms and in effect allows Ministers to decide whether to opt into the new framework or stay out of it.
	Throughout the debate, both Opposition parties pointed out that the structure proposed in the Bill gave Ministers too much power to keep the statistics board away from sensitive departmental statistics—to keep official figures in the shadows and prevent light from being shone on the darker corners of departmental statistical activity. In effect, it gave Ministers the right to say to the board, "Thus far and no further."
	Widespread disquiet was expressed during the consultation about the distinction between national and official statistics and the fact that the code would not be applied across all Government statistical activities. That disquiet came from organisations such as the Royal Statistical Society, the Statistics Commission, the Audit Commission, the Market Research Society, the Health and Social Care Information Centre, and the FDA—to name but a few.
	Let us return to the comments of Lord Moser, as we have done on a number of occasions. He described the distinction between the two types of statistics as meaningless and actually harmful in relation to public trust. Lord Turnbull hit the nail on the head on Second Reading in the other place when he said that the way in which the Government have approached this issue
	"can only give rise to suspicion, even if unwarranted, that the Government want either to tolerate a Ryman league of second-rate statistics not covered by the code or, worse, that Ministers want to keep certain statistics in the lower league so that they can get away with things that are outside the disciplines of the code."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 26 March 2007; Vol. 690, c. 1484.]
	I am afraid that the protestations of the former Financial Secretary, the hon. Member for Wentworth (John Healey), that the prestige of having departmental figures awarded the status of national statistics would motivate Ministers to propose them for inclusion in the board's new independent system of scrutiny and regulation were risible. I cannot believe that even he could have taken that seriously—no one else has, from the Treasury Sub-Committee onwards.
	Thankfully, the Government have gone on a journey. Little by little, in the face of pressure in the House and the other place, they have retreated. At first, they said that the idea of extending the scope of the code of practice was, to use the then Financial Secretary's words "extraordinary", "absurd" and "impractical". He confirmed that the Government expected the code
	"to be a model of good practice for official statistics, and we expect the board to promote it as such." ——[Official Report, Statistics and Registration Service Public Bill Committee, 18 January 2007; c. 153.]
	We then had the formal cave-in when the Government tabled amendments in the other place to remove the formal restriction of the code to national statistics by removing the word "national" from its title and leaving it as a code for statistics instead. Finally, Lord Davies of Oldham, speaking on behalf of the Government, went still further and said that the code, of course, applied to "official statistics"
	The Opposition warmly welcomed that statement. It was what we had been calling for since Second Reading and what the former Financial Secretary used to oppose. Our amendments are entirely consistent with the statement made by Lord Davies. They would rename the code so that it was a code of practice for official statistics. They would confirm the destination that the Government have reached by making good on the noble Lord's undertaking that the code should apply to official statistics. I hope that the Government will accept our amendments, if they intend to fulfil the promise made by the noble Lord.
	Our amendments also serve another important function by clarifying the confusion that has crept into the Government's position. The Government's journey was not quite over, even with the statement made by Lord Davies to which I have referred. Despite their starting point of restricting the application of the code only to national statistics, they ended up not only conceding the point on official statistics, but actually suggesting that the code should apply outside government. That would certainly be consistent with a common-sense interpretation of their amendments in the other place that removed the word "national" from the code and left it as purely a code of practice for statistics.
	Lord Davies confirmed that sudden and unexpected switch when he said on Report in the other place:
	"I have said that our crucial distinction is between national and official statistics, but the board will identify clear criteria for a code that ought to obtain with certain other statistics which may not be official but nevertheless may be of significance to the public realm. The board will be looked to to set the standard by which everything else is judged."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 18 June 2007; Vol. 693, c. 45.]
	That announcement caused consternation in the statistical community. It came totally out of the blue. After lengthy consultation and extensive debate, the Government had given no indication whatsoever that they intended the code or the board to have relevance outside the sphere of the Government's statistical work. Richard Alldritt of the Statistics Commission said that the Government had got themselves
	"in a tangle on this".
	I am inclined to agree.
	Lord Jenkin referred to a number of concerned statisticians in the debate on this matter in the other place, including the institute for economic and social research at Essex university. The institute warned of the danger that developing a code that would apply to statistics outside the Government would risk diluting the necessary principles that should apply to all official statistics. The need to remedy that confusion is another of the reasons why the Opposition have tabled amendments to the Lords amendments.
	There has also been a partial capitulation from the Government on the legal enforceability of the code. When the Bill was published, it was striking that it did not oblige anyone to obey the code of practice, despite the Government's promise to give that statutory backing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) memorably put it, the Bill gave the code
	"fewer teeth than the highway code".—[ Official Report, 13 March 2007; Vol. 458, c. 192.]
	We were told that the board would have the power to promote the code as a standard for all official statistics, but the Government failed to say how they would enforce the code. We have argued that the board should be given regulatory and supervisory powers, which, as the Government admitted in Committee, the Bill did not give it. Under the Bill, as it was drafted, the board would have had, to use the then Financial Secretary's words, "only a softer function"—a power to audit and assess, not to supervise or regulate. As Dr. Ivan Fellegi, one of the world's leading statisticians, has pointed out, that would be not very different to Statistics Commission's power to name and shame. The power would effectively be only one of exhortation.
	Obliging people to obey the code would give the board real authority to ensure that good practice was observed right across government. While we would have preferred the code to bind all in government who produce statistics, Lords amendment No. 17 is an important step forward because it at least imposes a duty to obey the code on those who produce national statistics. The Government finally seem to getting the point that we have been making from the outset: the code should be applied to the people who produce statistics, rather than only confined to a means of assessing particular sets of figures.
	It was welcome that Lord Davies made it clear in another place that the duty to obey the code applied not just to those responsible for producing national statistics, but all those who handled them, such as people preparing briefings for Ministers, and press officers. That is vital because many of the problems in the system relate to such officials—the policy and press officials in charge of interpreting and disseminating policy— not the statistical boffins compiling the data.
	The Government's journey has included important changes to the board's role in initiating the assessment process to decide whether a particular set of figures can qualify for the kitemark of a national statistic. We have made the point again and again that it was a fundamental flaw in the proposals that Ministers could keep their departmental figures out of the new framework for independent statistics merely by refusing to nominate them for assessment by the board. In such a situation, the board's only power was to name and shame the Minister in question. Its powers would have been no stronger than those of the Statistics Commission, which, valuable though its work has been, everyone agreed needed to be strengthened. We welcome the Government's about-turn on that vital issue. The process set out in Lords amendment No. 19 is rather cumbersome and does not go as far as we would like because it does not give the board unfettered power to initiate an assessment of whether a statistic complies with the code, but by formalising the process and requiring a Minister to answer to Parliament if he or she refuses to nominate a statistic for assessment the board will have much greater say in whether an assessment can be initiated. The Lords amendment represents a significant change to the Bill because it addresses a critical question.
	The then Financial Secretary's key argument for maintaining a two-tier system was that some statistics were more important than others. The decision on nomination effectively determined the borderline between the two types of statistics. As such, the decision was simply too important to be left only to Ministers. The then Financial Secretary acknowledged in Committee that that issue
	"cuts to the heart of the proposals in the Bill and the concerns that some have expressed." ——[Official Report, Statistics and Registration Service Public Bill Committee, 23 January 2007; c. 207.]
	We agreed with his analysis, which was why we pressed the point throughout our proceedings on the Bill. He said he expected the new system to evolve over time and embrace a wider range of statistics. Under the Bill as originally drafted, the pace of that evolution would have been determined by Ministers, even though the reform was designed to reduce their power and influence. Lords amendment No. 19 will give the board more power to drive the evolutionary process to which the Minister referred. However, it also places a burden on Parliament to back the statistics board and to force Ministers to yield their statistics for proper scrutiny.
	Leaving the board with inadequate powers on figures outside the scope of national statistics would leave a big hole in the legislation. As the House might recall from our earlier debates, a number of important Government figures are not national statistics. Indeed, Lord Davies admitted that the category of national statistics was "very limited" and that far more than 20 per cent. of official statistics fell outside the scope of the national statistics system. We believe and have argued throughout that there is no reason why important departmental figures should be subject to a less onerous regime than others, particularly where departmental figures have given rise to more problems than those produced by the Office for National Statistics. For example, according to the Library, since the 2000 reforms there has been a net increase of only 25 national statistics. We believe that there is no sensible reason why statistics on, for example, cervical cancer screening in Wales, small business survival rates, or armed forces medical discharges, which are not national statistics, deserve less scrutiny than the cider survey or the monthly statement on bricks, blocks and cement, which are.
	We hope that the board will use the process set out in amendment No. 19 to fill the hole in the legislation and to extend the range of statistics that are subject to the full rigour of the reforms set out in the Bill. We hope that the board will receive the strong support and encouragement of the House; it will certainly have ours.

Angela Eagle: I am pleased about the general welcome that has been given by both Opposition parties to the progress that has been made. I wish the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) had not described that progress as retreat, capitulation, and an about-turn, and that she had not issued press releases that talk about U-turns. It does not encourage the Government to think about being more flexible during the parliamentary process when as soon as they employ such an approach they are treated to such epithets. I prefer the interpretation of the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) and his welcome for the considerable progress that has been made. If the hon. Lady used that type of language, we might be able to make even more progress in coming to a consensus on the important matters that we are discussing. Being accused of retreat, capitulation and about-turns does not always encourage the Government to listen to debates in the way that they ought.
	I ask the House to resist the hon. Lady's amendments to the Lords amendments for reasons that I will come to shortly. Instead, I ask the House to support the amendments from the other place, which clarify the Government's intention on the question of scope of the application of the board's code of practice and compliance with it. Those amendments will enhance the role of the board in the assessment process—an issue to which the hon. Lady rightly referred.
	The amendments from the other place are aimed at addressing a number of concerns about the coverage of the statistical system that will be established by the Bill and will clarify and further underscore the Government's intentions as regards a number of matters relating to the code of practice. They will also address the issue of official and national statistics, which I believe will add even more transparency to the new statistical system we are creating. Our approach reflects the desire that the definitions used in the Bill should serve the statistical system and all those who use its outputs well, both now and in future. As such, the Government are concerned to ensure that the Bill includes as broad and as flexible a definition of "official statistics" as possible. I ask the House to consider the fact that legislation on statistics was last enacted in 1947. Now, 60 years down the line, we have another scintillating Bill, which hon. Members have spent many hours considering, so it may well be prudent to try to future-proof the Bill in case it takes another 60 years to get another legislative vehicle before the House that we can use to change or improve our statistical systems.
	That is why, in their definition of national and official statistics, the Government have tried to future-proof the Bill, rather than to narrow it and make it inflexible. There may not be many other legislative vehicles around in which we can iron out any inflexibilities that we inadvertently leave in the Bill, hence the wider definitions that feature in it.
	Until the Bill, there had never been a legal definition of "official statistics", and there is no agreed international definition, so at the start of the Bill-drafting process it was not immediately clear what the best way was of defining the term. Initially, it was thought that it could be defined as Government Statistical Service output, but the Government wanted to avoid a definition that would unnecessarily limit the role envisaged for the board, given developments in statistical production, activity in Government, and the need to anticipate what might happen in the next 60 years. Members of the Government Statistical Service are no longer the sole producers of statistical information within Government, and many of the key statistics that the public use to judge the Government's performance come from administrative sources.
	The Government therefore concluded that the definition of "official statistics" should be as wide as possible, and should include all statistics produced by the 200-plus Government Departments and agencies, the devolved Administrations and
	"any other person acting on behalf of the Crown".
	Such a definition meets our goal of being both very wide and future-proof. As we opted for a very wide definition, it was necessary for us to focus and prioritise the application of the formal assessment against the code. That assessment is established in clauses 12 and 13. The Government's aim is to help to ensure that greater resources are devoted to those statistics that have relatively greater importance. That is where the idea, raised by the hon. Member for Twickenham, of a rough hierarchy comes in. When it comes to the question of what is a national statistic and what is an official statistic, many hon. Members have had good fun with the inconsistencies around the edges. At the weekend, I read about egg bulletins and all sorts of other things that I had not realised existed. But clearly, in general, there is a rough hierarchy and it is possible to identify the most important statistics to represent properly what is going on in the country's economy and socially. It is fairly easy to see what they are, and I am glad the rough hierarchy has been recognised in the House.
	It is important that we allow the new board to prioritise which areas it should consider for assessment first. If the board were legally bound to undertake formal assessments of the vast and ever expanding range of official statistics, that would not be a sensible way forward, in view of the likely resource implications both for the board and for those being assessed. I expect that added credibility will come from securing independent endorsement of the quality and integrity of a set of statistics.
	The code of practice has a special role to play in relation to the assessment of national statistics, but the Government have always intended—I am glad to clarify this through the Lords amendments—that the code of practice should be used across all official statistics, at least as a guide to best practice, to allow an assessment to be made of statistics in the official pool, rather than the national statistic pool. Amendments Nos. 11, 16, 18, 31 and 39 will change the name of the code to the code of practice for statistics. The change is aimed at making that intention more explicit, clarifying that the code applies not only to national statistics, but to the broader range of official statistics.
	The Government have decided that the legal name for the code should be the code of practice for statistics, which expresses succinctly and clearly exactly what the code is for. As we heard, Opposition Members tabled amendments in lieu of the amendments from the other place, which would alter the name again, to the code of practice for official statistics, which I must resist. As I have just said, the code will be applied across official statistics, but will have a particular role in relation to national statistics, as the code against which the board will assess statistics to determine their compliance, and whether or not to award national statistics status. Calling it the code for official statistics may be confusing and could imply that it refers only to those official statistics, and not to the subset that are national statistics.

Angela Eagle: I seek the support of the House for the amendments from another place which seek to clarify the roles of the executive office under the national statistician's leadership and the head of assessment. Before I address the amendments, it may help Members if I remind them of the core governance model adopted in the Bill and why the amendments brought forward from another place help deliver the clarity that we all seek. The Government are committed to the governance structure established in the Bill, in which the single legal entity charged with delivering on the functions contained in the Bill is the statistics board. We believe that a single structure is the most effective way to deliver greater independence for the ONS and independent scrutiny and oversight of the statistical system as a whole, while avoiding the creation of competing centres of statistical expertise.
	The Bill provides that single institutional structure with a board that is legally responsible and accountable for all the body's functions. In line with the principles of good corporate governance, the Bill establishes that the board will have a mix of executives and non-executives, although we are legislating to ensure that there will always be a clear non-executive majority.
	In common with other Departments and public bodies, professionals acting under the board's direction will, we expect, discharge the executive business. However, the legal authority to act on behalf of the statistics board flows through the board, and the board must therefore retain authority to act in relation to matters for which it is accountable. The question of clarity of roles has nevertheless been a concern in both this House and the other place during the passage of the Bill, and the Government have recognised that the Bill could benefit from the key executive roles being more clearly set out on the face of the Bill. The Bill as drafted, augmented by the amendments before us today, makes it clear that the key functions of the board will be carried out by executives under the leadership of the national statistician and the head of assessment, while the legal entity that is ultimately responsible for those functions is the board collectively.
	The broad thrust of the amendments is to give even greater clarity to the operational role of the national statistician and the executive office with respect to both the board and the head of assessment. Amendment No. 32 removes the existing references in clause 29 to the executive office, and amendment No. 35 inserts a new clause in their place explicitly to set out those of the board's functions that will be undertaken by the executive office under the leadership of the national statistician. Those include the development and maintenance of definitions, methodologies, classifications and standards for official statistics under clause 9, the production of statistics, such as the retail prices index, under clauses 18 and 19, and the provision of statistical services under clause 20.
	The other amendments are designed further to emphasise what has always been our intention—that within the single statistics board structure, there will be a clear separation in the production of statistics under clause 18 from the assessment function established in clauses 12 and 13. That reflects the need to avoid the clear conflict of interest that would arise if a person who was responsible for producing any given statistic also had a role in determining whether, in producing that statistic, the code of practice had been complied with. Clause 30 has been included to ensure that such a situation could not arise, following interventions on the matter in Committee in the other place, where the Government undertook to re-examine the drafting to see whether our intention could be made clearer. The result of that re-examination is this group of amendments, the aim of which is unequivocally to confirm and clarify on the face of the Bill the separation between staff working on the assessment of statistics and those working on statistical production.

Theresa Villiers: At the outset, I want to put it on record that I welcome this group of amendments.
	Throughout the debate, the Opposition have expressed concern about the complicated institutional structure established by the Bill. We have pointed out that the Bill blurs the function of the national statistician with that of the board, which gives rise to three concerns. First, it creates confusion as to who does what and who accounts to whom. Secondly, vesting production and scrutiny functions in the same institution, the board, gives rise to conflict of interest problems, which could undermine confidence in the new system. Thirdly, it gives insufficient weight to the importance of the role of the national statistician and fails to give sufficient detail on what that role should involve.
	Again, we welcome the Government amendments, which are a step in the right direction. We appreciate that this is a difficult issue to get right, and there are various structures around the world covering how statistical offices operate. The amendments flesh out the Government's underlying idea that the production functions attributed to the board will be carried out by an executive office headed by the national statistician. Essentially, the executive office will carry out the role now broadly performed by the ONS. The amendments give greater clarity to the separation of functions within a unitary board structure, providing for a clearer delineation between the production functions as the remit of the national statistician and the executive office and the scrutiny and executive functions, which will be carried out by the head of assessment.
	As with the other Government amendments that we have considered today, a number of issues are still unresolved. We remain concerned about the blurred lines of accountability in relation to the new structures. The board will still act as judge and jury where a complaint is made about the production of ONS statistics or statistics that are currently produced by the ONS. Where a complaint is made about a decision made by the national statistician or her executive office, the complaint will be made to the board. In a very real sense, however, the board will have been responsible for the decision in the first place, which raises the danger of undermining confidence in the board's ability to take an impartial decision on whether the complaint should be upheld, particularly where it decides to back the judgment of the national statistician.
	If the chairman of the board were to rule against the national statistician and issue a rebuke, he would be in the embarrassing position of issuing a rebuke to himself as the chairman of the body responsible for the decision in the first place. We also worry that the loss of the independent watchdog, with the merger of the statistics commission with the ONS, will remove one of the existing safeguards in our statistical system and could be seen as a step backwards in the quest that the Opposition and the Government share to secure independent statistics in which people can safely place their trust and confidence. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the incredibly valuable work of the Statistics Commission since its establishment in 2000, and I also pay tribute to the work done at the ONS.
	The Government have never satisfactorily explained how the national statistician can be chief executive of the board, when a major function of the board is scrutiny and assessment, in which we all accept that it would be inappropriate for her to be involved. We continue to regret the Government's rejection of our amendments, which would have made it plain that the national statistician is chief executive of the executive office and not chief executive of the board as a whole.
	The Government have not adduced an example of a structure genuinely comparable to the one that they are establishing. As the then Financial Secretary more or less admitted in Committee, we are in uncharted waters as far as the model chosen by the Government is concerned. We can only hope that the quality and abilities of the board and the national statistician can develop what Baroness Noakes described as "successful workarounds" in making the new framework operate successfully.
	Lastly, I want to repeat on record that I wish that the Government had taken this opportunity to articulate and strengthen the role of the national statistician. After all, as the Exchequer Secretary has said, statistics Bills do not come around very often. I do not know whether it will be another 60 years before this House again has the chance to discuss official statistics, but it could be some time before there is a major reform of the statistical system.
	It is unfortunate that the Government have missed this significant opportunity to encode in statute some important functions for the national statistician. These include providing co-ordination and planning of our decentralised statistical system, which it so desperately needs, and the vital task of providing the professional leadership that government statisticians need. When Ministers or policy officials try to push them around or misuse or spin their statistics, the statisticians need a heavyweight figure to back them. The success or failure of this reform in restoring trust in official statistics is inextricably linked with the status and authority not only of the board but of the national statistician.
	Although it does not have the highest profile, few issues are more important than the health and integrity of our statistical system. Without accurate data on the state of our economy and our country, we can neither hold the Government to account nor take well informed policy decisions. Without accurate statistics, the policymaker is in effect like a doctor left unable to take his patient's temperature or blood pressure. Partial or misleading statistics leave Government and citizens alike groping in the dark and can lead to serious mismanagement of critically important decisions for our nation's future. That is why independent statistics are a key part of modern economic governance, and that is why they form a key part of our triple lock to entrench macro-economic stability in this country. I hope that the reforms will help to remedy an increasingly serious lack of trust in official statistics which has intensified during the 10 years this Government have been in office.

Angela Eagle: I do not accept for one moment the final assertion that the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) made about trust, but I thank her for being broadly supportive of the changes that we are discussing; that is welcome.
	The hon. Lady said that she wanted to get rid of the national statistician as chief executive of the statistics board, as well as enhancing the position of the national statistician in a more general way. That is a rather contradictory approach. I assure her about the independence of the statistics board in its assessment functions. She asked how it could really be independent as the board responsible for assessment and production of statistics. With the strengthening changes that we set out in the Lords, and in the general structure of the Bill, the Government have included mechanisms that clearly separate production and assessment.
	There will be a head of assessment who will be appointed by the non-executive board members. Under clauses 5 and 29, he or she will be the board's principal adviser on assessment issues. The head of assessment will lead the staff working on assessment issues, who cannot work on statistical production and, under clause 30, will report separately via the head of assessment directly to the board. Decisions on whether to approve something as a national statistic cannot be delegated from the board; it must take those decisions itself. Under clause 30, the national statistician cannot therefore take part in decisions about the award of a national statistics designation for any statistics produced by his or her office. It will be in the board's interests to ensure that the quality of all statistics is high; that is part of its objective. It will clearly apply the same standards in conducting the assessment of ONS statistics as it will for any other body. I hope that the hon. Lady will rest assured that the separations of powers within the structure are robust and are highlighted throughout the Bill.
	As for whether the national statistician is somehow having her role downgraded, as the hon. Lady knows, the new post of national statistician will be a Crown appointment, as set out in clause 5. Clause 28 gives the national statistician the power and prestige that they will need to do the job. The board has to take account of the advice of the national statistician on all statistical matters. If, under clause 27, it overrules the national statistician on a professional technical decision, it must publish a statement, including the reasons why, and lay it before Parliament. The national statistician is a full member of the board, sharing responsibility with other board members for ultimate decision making, rather than advising Ministers, who are currently the ultimate decision makers. That considerably enhances, rather than diminishes, the role of the national statistician. I hope that the hon. Lady will rest assured that, far from the national statistician having a reduced role under the Bill, it gives her a considerably enhanced role. I hope that the House will accept the Lords amendments.
	 Lords amendment agreed to.
	 Lords amendments Nos. 33 to 39 agreed to.
	 Lords amendments Nos. 40 to 64 disagreed to.
	 Lords amendment: No. 65.

Eddie McGrady: I endorse the sentiments expressed by the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) in congratulating the Minister on his elevation within the jurisdiction and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Woodward) on his new post of Secretary of State. I think that we have got the measure of both of them already, and I hope that we will be able to work very closely with them. However, they occasionally spring surprises, even on those of us who have had many surprises over the years.
	The police reform and reconstruction in Northern Ireland has been one of the great success stories for the people of Northern Ireland and, indeed, for the two Governments. One must remember that the Patten initiative and the Patten recommendations were bitterly opposed by the Democratic Unionist party and, initially, by Sinn Fein. How comforting it is a for a member of my party to see both now ardently embracing the new policing structures and promising to do better than we ever did. If I were to put it colloquially, I would say more power to their elbow. It was also gratifying recently to note that the oversight commissioner, who is assiduous in examining the process, was complimentary about the fact that more than 86 per cent. of the Patten recommendations had been achieved in a five-year period, which is only half the 10-year span originally allotted.

Eddie McGrady: The hon. Gentleman's reference to me as the humble Member precludes my accepting the accolades that he has thrown in my direction, but I will do so on behalf of other people—perhaps not so much the Policing Board members, who, as elected representatives, took a decision and accepted the risk and the profile that went with it, but, once more, the ordinary DPP members, both elected and independent, who, to be quite blunt about it, suffered greatly at the hands of Sinn Fein in particular. My colleagues in the SDLP—both elected and non-elected—had their homes bombed, got bullets in the post, were physically threatened and sometimes physically assaulted. It is so easily forgotten that they made those sacrifices, and I am very proud to be associated with them. However, progress has been made, things move on, history is rewritten, and revisionism is the order of the day in Northern Ireland in many respects, including the devolution of powers to the new Government.
	A member of the Patten commission said that the Police Service of Northern Ireland has
	"more accountability than any police agency that I am aware of"
	in the world. Such tremendous accolades from people with worldwide experience of policing give great satisfaction, but much more important is the fact that members of the community, particularly those who found the old regime hostile and in no way representative of their views, have now come, almost with enthusiasm at long last, to embrace policing simply as a profession, with the aspiration, one hopes, of doing good for their own community. That is evolving, and the district policing partnerships are a great example of how that has happened.
	The hon. Member for Aylesbury asked some extremely interesting questions, although I assume some were tongue in check, because he knows, as I do, that a blind eye will be turned to all sorts of things to achieve the ultimate theoretical position on all those boards. To take one example—I hope that the Minister will reply to this as well—if the reconstruction of the district policing partnerships follows the reconstruction of the Policing Board by the Northern Ireland Office, there will be great disparities in the broad scope of representation. To put it bluntly, moderate nationalist opinion, which fought in the heat of the day and worked in the heat of the afternoon, has been virtually obliterated from the Northern Ireland Policing Board. I would like to think that the same philosophy—it is a mystery to me why it was used—will not be visited on the new district policing partnerships through the new board in this new composition.
	The order is fairly straightforward and simple. It relates to section 15 of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2003, on the declaration against terrorism. I hope that the interpretation of "terrorism" will be expanded to cover involvement in any quasi-political activity such as intimidation, extortion and blackmail. Elected Sinn Fein councillors who signed up to this process many years ago were still engaged in such activities in their own communities; for all I know, some of them might still be. I would like officials, including representatives of the board and the NIO, to keep a close eye on what is happening in respect of the undertaking to oppose terrorism and all aspects of what the paramilitary machines have been engaged in over the past 10 years since the so-called ceasefire—at least by republican Sinn Fein.
	I make that final point as there has been no ceasefire by the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association. Paradoxically, the chairperson of the political wing of the UVF, the Progressive Unionist party, was appointed to be a member of the Policing Board some time ago despite the fact that the organisation her party represents is not on ceasefire and will not commit to any form of decommissioning. The NIO should attempt to explain that paradox.
	Mention has been made of section 16 and the issue of convictions after five years. I will not rehearse the questions posed by the hon. Member for Aylesbury, but let me venture a layman's point of view. How can a policing board, a council or any other body making selections take cognisance of something in someone's history or current circumstances that has not gone through the process of a court of law? I cannot see how that could happen, because if it were to do so, it would immediately raise the possibility of there being allegations of slander and libel in respect of unproven facts. However, if there are ways of addressing this matter, they should be done.
	Section 19 addresses Belfast sub-groups. I have some misgivings—"fears" is too strong a word—as to what might be the ultimate effect. A possible disastrous outcome is the ghettoisation of the democratic interface with the police in Belfast city. It will clearly be difficult to have the kind of representation that we desire in certain areas of west, east, north and south Belfast. It might have been better to have been more cautious and to have kept things as they were in respect of Belfast DPPs and how sub-groups might contribute. The Police Service of Northern Ireland reconstruction of its command structure has brought together several district councils. However, its undertaking to maintain the original 26 or so DPPs retains local contact, local democracy, local accountability and, most important, local knowledge and interface. That might be the best way to move forward.
	I wish to ask a question that has frequently been posed by me and other members of my party. Why have the Government and the NIO turned their face so strongly against the obvious case for rationalisation in respect of DPPs and community safety partnerships? They overlap in some of their functions. They are supported and part-personneled by district councils and they have duplication in officers and secretariats. I cannot see any rational argument why the functions of the DPPs should not be combined with those of the community safety partnerships so that they form one body.
	There is an historical aspect to this issue, which the NIO has never admitted. When Sinn Fein could muscle in big time on community safety locally—it could never be seen to participate in community policing—that was the origin, I think, of the split thinking in the NIO. Presumably, all that has gone now that Sinn Fein in particular has embraced so fully the PSNI and that its members right down the line are going to participate in the district policing partnerships. However, one query remains. Just this week in my Down district local paper, I read that Sinn Fein councillors cannot yet participate in district policing partnerships—or, indeed, in district safeguard committees—because of police attendance. That raises the question of just how deep the conviction is to sustain independent, impartial and accountable policing. However, I will leave that question hanging.
	As I said, I would like to know why district policing partnerships are being kept divorced from community safety partnerships, given that they perform a like service from a like source. When schedule 8 to the Northern Ireland (St. Andrews Agreement) Act 2006 comes into play, perhaps it will round off the advances in policing. I would like to think that the double-speak that has taken place in our communities on policing for so long is over at long last, and that all the communities will truly—truly—give service and allegiance to policing, while at the same time holding the police forcefully and totally to account for their actions.
	The attitude towards, and the support of moderate opinion—particularly moderate nationalist opinion—for the process of justice and, thereby, of policing has taken a severe dent lately. The Public Prosecution Service failed to take any court action—or any action at all—against those who were involved in the murder of Pat Finucane. According to the Stevens report and other police inquiries, there was prima facie evidence that those people were involved in his murder, and that the state played a complicit role. The NIO and the PSNI do not recognise how damaging that decision was to the community.

Paul Goggins: I begin, on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and myself, by thanking all those who contributed to the debate this evening—my hon. Friend the Member for South Down (Mr. McGrady) and the hon. Members for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) and for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack)—for their generous remarks to us. We intend to be the dynamic duo, although I hope there will not be too many surprises, as we do not have quite the same opportunities these days to mount surprises, but one never knows.
	If the hon. Member for South Staffordshire is right and the hon. Member for Aylesbury is destined for other things—he smiles as I say that—I wish him well. Our debates on Northern Ireland will be the poorer without him. The revelation in his remarks that he had personally already seen five of the eight new district commanders in Northern Ireland is testament to the quiet way in which he diligently carries out his job. As much as we will miss him, however, the area of responsibility he moves into will be the beneficiary.
	The hon. Gentleman is right to point to the progress that has been made—the way in which the arrangements for policing and accountability for policing in Northern Ireland are working—but he is right to say that more needs to be done. We need to make further progress and the DPPs will be an important element in making sure that policing in Northern Ireland is accountable, and that across the country people are engaged in the development of policing strategies that serve their communities. The legislation we are introducing today will enable DPPs to do that even more effectively.
	When the hon. Gentleman mentioned the criteria for disqualification, he put his finger on a very sore point. It is a difficult area, but all we can do in this place is to bring the rules for independent members of DPPs into line with those for the political members. All members, both independent and political, must make a declaration against terrorism and, as it is short, I shall read it out. It states:
	"I declare that, if appointed, I will not by word or deed express support for or approval of...any organisation that is for the time being a proscribed organisation specified in Schedule 2 to the Terrorism Act 2000; or acts of terrorism (that is to say, violence for political ends) connected with the affairs of Northern Ireland."
	That is an unequivocal statement by any would-be independent member of a DPP of their complete aversion and opposition to acts of terrorism, so although the hon. Member for Aylesbury has identified a difficult area, I hope that gives him comfort that we are aware of the need to make progress to sustain a more hopeful future.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about criminal checks. It is important to emphasise that that is a matter for the Policing Board, which has central responsibility and has set out the related procedures in its code of practice—specifically in paragraph 96. The board will of course write to the Chief Constable about the criminal record of any independent member whose appointment it is considering. There is a robust system so that the Policing Board, which rightly has responsibility, can check out each and every independent member it may be considering for appointment.
	The hon. Gentleman spoke about political balance, which is a difficult matter for the reasons he gave. Section 14 of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2003 requires the Policing Board in appointing independent members of the DPP to ensure that they, together with the political members, are representative of the district that the DPP serves. The detail is set out in the code of practice, which is out for consultation at present.
	I apologise to the hon. Gentleman and to the House for being opaque—as he put it—about the arrangements in Belfast. As he suggested, my opaqueness was deliberate, because in the end the decisions are not for me but for the Policing Board, Belfast city council and the Chief Constable to work out together. The number can be up to four, but they must work out the appropriate arrangements for them, so opaque I shall remain in relation to that matter.
	There are two points relating to political balance that I hope will give the hon. Gentleman some encouragement. First, all the sub-groups must have representatives from the four main political parties; no political party will be shut out of any of the sub-groups. Secondly, the sub-groups feed into the DPP itself, which has an over-arching, overriding role across the whole city of Belfast. It is not the sub-groups that feed into the Policing Board and the council, but the DPP that takes an overview, so there should be balance across the whole city.
	The hon. Gentleman said that Belfast is different, but asked how different and whether there are other areas of Northern Ireland that might need special arrangements. We recognise in the legislation that Belfast needs some special arrangements, and that is what we have put in place. With the review of public administration, the map of local government in Northern Ireland will look different in the future, so all these things need to be kept under review. Happily, it is increasingly the case that the review is being undertaken by those who rightly have the responsibility for local government and ultimately, hopefully in the not too distant future, for policing and justice as well—local Ministers and locally accountable people.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Down for his remarks and pay tribute, as others have, to the role that he personally played in relation to policing accountability in Northern Ireland. He was a member of the Policing Board when it was very difficult to be a member of the Policing Board. He took risks, along with his colleagues, and I pay tribute to him. On every opportunity that I have to debate policing, I will always make that point, because he stood out when others did not and we are all very grateful to him for doing that. We have reflected together on the consequences, as he puts it, of his bravery and the bravery of his colleagues. As others have come on board, perhaps there is less space for his party in terms of the Policing Board and the DPPs, but if the number of seats on some of the bodies has perhaps reduced, I hope that it is of some comfort to him to know that he has played a key role in moving the whole of Northern Ireland forward to a more peaceful and prosperous future. His role in that should never be forgotten.
	My hon. Friend drew a comparison between the Policing Board and the DPPs, but there is of course one crucial difference. The Policing Board was appointed, as he pointed out, by the Secretary of State, whereas the DPPs are appointed by the Policing Board. The Policing Board has an obligation to make sure that there is proper balance and, as I have said, that is set out in the code of practice.
	My hon. Friend put his finger on an important issue that will be the subject of further deliberation by me, as the Minister with responsibility for security, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and those involved in policing and local authority administration. I am talking about the question of the overlap between community safety partnerships and DPPs. We have to recognise that the two arrangements have different functions. The function of the DPP is to hold the local policing arrangements to account. The community safety partnerships, on the other hand, are about delivery, so there is a difference in the core purpose of each of the bodies. That said, there is clearly an overlap. I hope that my hon. Friend will be reassured to know that I have commissioned some work by officials in the Northern Ireland Office—working with the Policing Board and others—to look at the matter afresh to see whether we can develop a model that will minimise any overlap in the future and will give us the best possible structure.
	We would all acknowledge the longevity of the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire in the role that he plays and we thank him for his questions and scrutiny, as well as his support on a number of key issues. He rightly reflects on how far we have come in such a short space of time and he was right to pay tribute to the various people he mentioned. He was also right to acknowledge that this is another important milestone in the journey towards a more accountable police service and a more peaceful Northern Ireland. We know that the police service in Northern Ireland is now probably the most accountable police service anywhere in the world. That is why increasing confidence can be put behind it.
	The hon. Member for South Staffordshire, as the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, brings considerable knowledge and experience to these debates. I pay tribute to the work of his Committee on the issue of organised crime, the restorative justice schemes and various other areas. I am conscious that he and his Committee are currently taking a long hard look at the Prison Service in Northern Ireland and I look forward to further conversations with him about that.
	This is, as the hon. Gentleman said, a gesture of faith, but it is not a reckless gesture of faith. We have a well-founded belief that the arrangements will work and represent another step forward towards ensuring that we have an accountable police service in Northern Ireland that can underpin the peace and prosperity that we all want. I was pleased that he rightly paid tribute to the important role of the Chief Constable. Sir Hugh Orde is performing that role well.
	The hon. Gentleman was also right to remind us that for all the progress that has been made, difficulties still remain. There is still too much sectarianism in some communities in Northern Ireland. We want the structures of division that are still in place to be removed when it is eventually safe to do so. We must not be complacent. Direct-rule Ministers must continue to work hard with devolved Ministers and all structures of both civil society and government to ensure that we work with communities so that the hope, optimism and opportunity that we face are turned into a reality with a peaceful and prosperous future for Northern Ireland.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That the draft Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2003 (Commencement No. 2) Order 2007, which was laid before this House on 6th June, be approved.

Rosie Winterton: I beg to move,
	That this House takes note of European Union document number 7828/07 and ADD 1, Commission Communication, GALILEO at a cross-road—the implementation of the European GNSS programmes; and endorses the Government's approach to discussions on this document.
	The Government welcome the opportunity for a full discussion on the Galileo programme. I thank the European Scrutiny Committee, and especially my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), for their work on scrutinising the project. There is no doubt that the programme is at a turning point. Negotiations with the merged consortium bidding for a public-private partnership concession have been ended. In October, the Transport Council and ECOFIN are likely to be asked to make a decision on the future direction of the programme. The Government intend that that decision should be based on a full assessment of all relevant factors, including the identification of the available options, their costs and risks, and the programme's affordability.

Bernard Jenkin: The hon. Lady says that the Government are giving the assurance that this will not be for dedicated military use. Why does she put the word "dedicated" in front of "military use"? Why does not she just say that it will not be used for military purposes, end of story—or is this meant to be a covertly joint defence programme?

Rosie Winterton: That is exactly the question that we have given back to the Commission. As the hon. Gentleman will know, in the first consortium that was put together there were sources of private sector revenue. We want to ensure that we are considering all the commercial aspects. It would not be right for me to prejudge that.
	One of the Galileo successes so far is the test satellite built in Guildford and delivered on time and on budget, which has successfully transmitted all the operational Galileo signals. That is a real success, and it should be one of the lessons learned from the project. It was delivered by a small company, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., a high-tech spin off from Surrey university. If Galileo is to work for the Community, we need more successes like that across Europe. Unfortunately, for a majority of our European partners, the failure of flawed negotiations has tainted the idea of a public-private partnership. In that context, there is a risk that people tend to fall back on what they know—in this case, public procurement—as the safe option. By doing so, frankly, they ignore the facts. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet said at the June Council, if the private sector is not willing to face the risks of the project, what makes us think that the public sector can handle them? The risks—cutting edge design, uncertainty of revenues, cost and timetable overruns, and the industrial rivalries which have caused significant delays—do not change.
	The Government are therefore committed to defending the principles which we believe are essential for a successful project. We will continue to argue for a robust approach and to widen the support for that among transport and finance colleagues in Europe. If, nevertheless, the PPP approach is abandoned by consensus, and if the alternative is affordable in the view of the budget authorities, we will continue to work for clarity in governance, open competition and value for money, in line with our commitments to this House. I commend the motion to the House.

Owen Paterson: I am grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour for making that point. He is right to stress the significance of American help and I will tackle that further in my remarks. It is inconceivable that the GPS could be turned off, but I shall say more about that shortly.
	After outline approval at the Nice European Council in December 2000, the ESA, in partnership with the European Commission, made plans to match the US GPS. Crucially, unlike the US system, it was to be completely under civilian control and, also unlike the US system, which enjoyed taxpayer funding, its deployment and operation was to be financed by a public-private partnership, with the private sector bearing two thirds of the costs.
	Unfortunately, although the Galileo project was intended to be Europe's satellite navigation system, it also became, in the manner of so many European projects, a virility symbol, which was intended to demonstrate the success of European economic and political integration. Mrs. Loyola de Palacio, then Vice-president of the Commission with responsibility for transport and energy, declared at the inception of the development stage of Galileo on 26 March 2002:
	"Europe has finally taken the political decision to launch this strategic programme. Today we are seeing the creative side of Europe... It will help Europe to maintain its autonomy, its sovereignty, its technological capacity and control of its knowledge."
	Five years later, Galileo is at what the European Commission coyly calls a cross-road. More accurately, it is in crisis, which arises from the complete failure of the plan for financing the scheme and the time scale for deployment. On the basis of a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Commission claimed:
	"Considerable economic benefits should be generated by Galileo."
	It also claimed that the project would cost €3.6 billion to complete and that, assuming a "worst case scenario", total benefits would be €17.8 billion. On that understanding, in 2002 the then Prime Minister—the current steward of the Chiltern hundreds—personally approved the scheme at the Barcelona European Council on 13 and 14 March. Two years later, the Commission confidently predicted that Galileo
	"will definitely become operational in 2008".
	A mere three years later, the Commission admits to a date of 2012, and some industry sources suggest that it could be 2014. Although 30 satellites are planned, the only tangible achievement is a single test satellite, Giove-A because the second, Giove-B, has been short-circuiting and will possibly not be launched until December.
	As for future costs, an unpublished Commission report now admits that, against the original estimate of €3.4 billion for deployment, plus an additional €5.3 billion for operation and maintenance—a maximum of €8.7 billion—the system will now cost €9 billion to €12 billion up to 2030. The best-case scenario for revenue becomes €8 billion to €10 billion, or less if the more accurate US GPS III offers high-level services free of charge. From a projected profit of €17.8 billion, the maximum is now €1 billion, with a possible loss of €4 billion.
	That is why the PPP refused the risk, as was said. With Navstar provided free of charge, one unnamed executive of the failed consortium is quoted in the  Financial Times as saying:
	"There is a doubt over the revenues... Why sell Pepsi-Cola when you can get Coca-Cola free?"
	The Commission is now asking member states to bail out its pet project by injecting a huge tranche of public money despite a solemn guarantee in November 2001 that
	"no more public money would be needed after 2007".
	So desperate is it that the venture should continue that it offers two main options: that the funding should come either through the ESA or, preferably, through the Community budget. Additionally, in its February communication, it also proposed a new stealth tax—incredibly, a levy on GPS receivers, most of which are designed to receive a signal provided free of charge by the US.
	In the manner of a child commenting on Lord Randolph Churchill, we must ask what Galileo is for. Ostensibly, it is to provide navigation services, not only for people who live in Europe, but worldwide. As was said, the US Navstar GPS system is currently available free of charge to every user, while coming along is the Russian Glonass and Chinese Beidou compass system, both of which will also be free of charge.
	Arguing against cancellation, some advocates will say that Galileo offers greater accuracy and a guarantee of a service not offered by other systems. Galileo's high level of accuracy, however, applies only to the subscription services. There will be no significant difference in the publicly accessible signal, which at the moment is deemed perfectly sufficient for any number of commercial or Government systems. Last year, for example, I visited Berlin and saw the Satellic road-pricing scheme in action, which tracks and charges every single truck over 12 tonnes on German autobahns. Only GPS is used. When I asked about Galileo, the answer was quite clear: they said that if it comes along, they might use it, but they are under no pressure, as they have GPS and their system works. That scheme has been a huge success, pulling in about €250 million a month.
	Last week, I had meetings with representatives of Trafficmaster plc, a highly successful company selling navigation services to more than 100,000 vehicles in the UK. Its technical director, Christopher Barnes, said that
	"the free to air GPS service is sufficient for vehicle navigation and therefore we are unlikely to be interested in paying (either voluntarily or through a compulsory tax) to use a European service, even if technically it would be better."
	There is extremely limited application for the higher accuracy that Galileo will offer and, in any event, any such advantage will last only until the US deploys Block III Navstar, which promises equivalence.

Owen Paterson: The answer to that question posed by my parliamentary neighbour from Montgomeryshire is that we have GPS now and it will be enhanced by Block III. The answer is to use the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service and to get them integrated.
	Fears about continuity of service are totally bogus. The President of the US said in December 2004 that providing uninterrupted access to the system and the provision of services on a continuous, worldwide basis for civil use, free of direct user fees for civil, commercial, and scientific uses was their clear policy. The US is also committed to providing GPS to NATO—a point on which my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) touched—where it is used not only for navigation but for command and control systems, weapons delivery and, crucially, for the prevention of friendly fire. That is the so-called blue-force tracker system.
	So central are satellite navigation systems to the military that, during the height of the Iraq war in 2004, the United States did not close down the system in the region even after it found out that Iraqi forces were using it against the US. Additionally, the Federal Aviation Service approves Navstar as a navigational device in aircraft and, as can readily be seen from the 2001 federal radio-navigation plan, continuity of service is a key element in the provision of the service, without which the system simply could not be approved.
	As I thought that some of these questions might come up in the debate, I spoke yesterday to Brigadier General Simon P. Worden USAF, retired, who was responsible for bringing GPS into fruition in 1995. He is now the director of NASA's Ames research centre. Speaking to me in a private capacity, on his own account, he said:
	"There is no part of the US economy that does not depend on the continuity of GPS. Any loss of service would have a devastating impact on the US economy."
	According to him, nor could Europe ever be deprived of signals. He went on:
	"So many European systems are integrated with US systems that they would all go down if Europe was jammed."
	Where does that leave us? We have a system that offers no advantages whatever over what is freely available elsewhere, yet we are being asked to consider funding to the tune of several billions for what is essentially a European Union vanity project. We are not alone in having reservations. After the conclusion of the Transport Council in Luxembourg on 8 June, the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman)—who I see in his place—was quoted by the  Financial Times as saying:
	"I don't see a strategic case for it. One of the questions we have never asked is how to make a return from this system."
	He added that the UK would seek cancellation if concerns were not answered. In parliamentary replies to me, he has said that the Government have admitted to spending €142 million on the project through the European Space Agency and, through contributions to the EU budget, approximately 17 per cent. of the estimated €790 million that the Commission has invested in the programme. That amounts to €276 million in the past three years. The Government have also added that there is not an identified UK contribution to the design and development phase of the programme via the EU budget. To continue the negotiations on additional funding would be tantamount to signing a blank cheque.
	Therefore, we have to say that we are not content with the Government's approach to discussions on the Commission document. Although the hon. Member for South Thanet was prepared to countenance cancellation of the project outside the Council chamber, it appears that he did not do so inside it. There is, however, a practical alternative, which the hon. Gentleman did not offer to his European colleagues but which he should have pressed. Preceding the development of Galileo is the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service—EGNOS.

Owen Paterson: The debate is whether we are happy with the Government's negotiating stance. They have left us with two forms of public funding, either through community funds or through the European Space Agency. I would have liked EGNOS to be promoted. It is a satellite-based system that will augment Navstar and Glonass, making them suitable for safety-critical applications such as flying aircraft or navigating ships through narrow channels. Properly integrated with Navstar GPS beyond 2008, that would provide for all Europe's needs. The UK has already paid its contribution of €35 million towards it. It would be a short cut to playing a key role in a global system.

William Cash: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way on the question raised by the former Minister. In the discussions that the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) described in the correspondence to the European Scrutiny Committee, he said that
	"a clear majority of Member States underlined the strategic nature of the Galileo programme and the importance they attach to the project".
	So, irrespective of anything that he might or might not have said, and irrespective of whether we like it, the fact is that, under the majority voting system, this thing is moving inexorably ahead because the Government, in their vainglorious fashion, happen to believe that they can chuck away taxpayers' money to the tune of billions of pounds without anybody blinking an eyelid.

Owen Paterson: That is a ludicrous misinterpretation of what I said. I clearly explained a vision of linking EGNOS with GPS and giving Europe the best and most defined service—down to a metre. Let me address the idea that we are against business. I visited Trafficmaster last week and it now employs 300 people. The jobs are downstream in areas such as e-Call rather than to do with the actual creation of the satellite systems. It supplies 100,000 vehicles and its jobs are downstream and have been created on the back of GPS. The entire Satellic system in Germany is also based on GPS, and it is worth €250 million a month.

Alistair Carmichael: I will not detain the House long. I welcome the Minister to her new position. She comes to the job with a good reputation in other Departments, and I very much hope that she can continue that in the Department for Transport. I am also pleased to see the hon. Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman) in his place; I have enjoyed working with him since taking up this brief. I understand that he intends to spend more time with his Alfa Romeo. I am sure that I speak for Members in all parts of the House when I wish him well in whatever he does next.
	As I said to the Minister during an intervention, for once, I am pleased about the timing of a debate such as this, inasmuch as we are scrutinising a subject before the decision is going to be made. Too often in these European debates, we end up examining a measure after the decision has already been taken. All we are able to do is criticise and describe how things might have been. Having said that—the Minister might now be thinking, "Some people are never satisfied"—I fear that, because so much of the detail on the Commission's position is to be made clear in the months to come, the House is unable to have a fully informed debate. I hope that there will be further opportunity for some measure of debate. I appreciate that, as a result of the way in which we organise our business in the House, it is not necessarily going to be possible to have that debate before an October Council. However, be it through the European Scrutiny Committee or some other mechanism, I hope that those who have expressed an interest tonight in this issue can be kept informed before the December Council.
	We Liberal Democrats continue to hold the view that the principle behind Galileo remains sound. We hold the strong view that what is needed is needed for reasons of economic and strategic importance. We do not, however, take the view that that can be an open-ended commitment, which is why we think that the real debate here is the one highlighted by the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Mr. Connarty). It states that
	"we suggest that there is a prior assertion from the Commission, which the Minister touches on only briefly, which perhaps also needs to be fully tested — that is the case for continuing the Galileo project at all, rather than writing off the sunk cost and letting Europe's industry continue to exploit the existing and developing opportunities available through GPS uses."
	That is a point that the hon. Gentleman made a few minutes ago and I entirely concur with it. It is an eminently sensible approach to take. The question essentially for the House is how sustainable is the PPP model for which the Government express such enthusiasm. The true point, which will have to be addressed eventually, is if the PPP model does not look like delivering, what will the Government's position be? Frankly, we cannot answer that question at the moment, because it is a judgment that can be made only once the figures are available. That is why I remain concerned that we are still being asked tonight to buy a pig in a poke.
	We concur with the Government's position for now. I cannot go beyond that and I do not think that the Government would be sensible to try to do so. We remain keen to support this, but the sums must add up.

William Cash: In encouraging my hon. Friend in his important argument about the extent to which anti-Americanism lies behind the promotion of this project, may I ask him whether he heard this morning an extremely interesting programme by Justin Webb on the attitudes of the French—including, for example, Hubert Védrine— who are absolutely obsessed with anti-Americanism? The very point that my hon. Friend makes is demonstrated over and again in the attitudes that they adopt. But if we consider the big landscape, which I think he is seeking to paint, we ought to remember that between 1940 and 1945 the Americans did an enormous amount to save Europe, let alone the United Kingdom.

Bernard Jenkin: I am always a little sceptical about figures produced by the European Commission on the success of its policies, given that Europe has been far more effective at producing public sector jobs than private sector jobs over the past 10 or 15 years. But if I may just pick up the challenge laid down by my hon. Friend, the key question is where the private sector revenues will come from. If there was any prospect of a secure revenue stream for the project, the private sector would be willing to invest in order to harness that revenue stream. Not only does that revenue stream not exist, there is no prospect of it coming into existence. The idea that this could be a privately funded project, resting on private capital, charging a privately generated revenue stream to get the satellites into orbit, has now been exposed. The project has been in the public domain for 10 years. The European Commission has been promulgating the idea that somehow the money will appear as a result of the satellites' commercial potential for 10 years. The money will not appear. The revenue stream is not there. There comes a point when the Government must ante-up to their own position, which is that they should oppose the system in principle. It is a waste of money. It will not fly. It is a dud system.

Bernard Jenkin: There are many things that the EU could do very well. It could do free trade well. Unfortunately, it does not. It could do lighter regulation. It could do co-operation much better. There are many things that we hope and pray the EU can be reformed to do very much better, but with the best will in the world, it will find it very difficult to provide a global satellite positioning system for free, which is what the Americans provide for us. There is a saying about gift horses and looking them in the mouth. We have a gift horse and we are looking it in the mouth. We do not need to pay for our own gift horse when we have been given this gift by the United States for the world to enjoy. It is not anti-European. I am waiting for the proponents of the system to demonstrate that there is some commercial logic behind it, which is what I was promised in European Standing Committee B. To pay credit to the Government, they did say that they would not go ahead with this unless there was a commercial logic to it. I put it to them that there is no commercial logic to this system.
	I want to get back to the crucial opening point that I made, which is that this is a microcosm of what is wrong with the Government's European policy. We all know that the Minister is sitting on the Treasury Bench is because the Foreign Office has decided that the Department of Transport must not veto the project.

Tobias Ellwood: I am not misrepresenting the hon. Gentleman; if I can make some progress he will understand where I am coming from.
	The GPS system is making significant revenue streams for myriad companies, both national and international, not only in America but also across Europe and the world as a whole. Were the system to be cut off, it would cause absolute economic chaos. That is the first reason it will not be switched off and the second is that it is part of a NATO operation. The security of this country, Europe and the wider world depend on the satellite system, so there are two profound reasons why it will not be switched off.
	There are commercial aspects, too. We heard that even the Minister has a piece of GPS equipment in her ministerial car— [ Interruption. ] It is in her private car. She has one of the TomTom navigation systems that are also used for map-making, land surveying, scientific studies and air traffic control, as well as in clocks and timepieces and for shipping, not to mention their military uses, from missile guidance to transport systems. All are extremely successful and GPS sales average about £20 million a year, with 95 per cent. of the units sold for civilian rather than military use. That is a success story and we should be aware of it. Not only is the equipment efficient; it is reliable, accurate and, as has been said time and again, it is free.
	The GLONASS system is a different story. It was completed in 1995, with 24 satellites, but fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Russian economy. Russia is committed to restoring the system but there have been delays in the process. Huge sums of money have had to be thrown at the system to get it back up and working. There are lessons to be learned from both those systems and we need to learn them quickly before the decision in October, which commits us one way or another.
	I will quickly summarise where we stand with Galileo. The system was devised in 2002 to rival the GPS system. There were eight companies and five nations involved, but today, as we have heard, the project is floundering. Only one out of 30 satellites is in orbit and that is a test system. The project was supposed to be in operation by next year, but the latest estimate is 2014—if the project goes ahead and we get all the satellites up in orbit. The German Transport Minister recently described the project as in "profound and serious crisis." That crisis is being caused by funding.
	The original plan involved 50:50 financing between the EU and the European Space Agency. The UK part of the funding came from the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Transport. The private sector was to pay for two thirds. As we have heard, the original cost was €3.2 billion; that is now spiralling towards €10 billion over the next 20 years. I have asked how much has been spent by the British and we have not had an answer.
	The original plan involved a public-private partnership, with companies footing much of the bill in the hope of selling satellite navigation services to commercial users. Who is going to buy a satellite service today when there is a free service available? The only organisations that would buy satellite services would be the Government and public sector organisations—to prop up the costly system. Perhaps we can expect to see congestion charging or the military being converted to the system in order to prop up the funding for the entire project.
	If we vote on the motion, we will see Labour Members and the Government walking through the Division Lobby, but I do not believe they will fully understand what they are voting for or signing up to. We do not need this system, we cannot afford it and there is no market for it at all. It is a sheer waste of money and, as we have heard today, the project is based on the ridiculous assumption that the US will somehow turn its system off.

Rosie Winterton: Yes, we should. I can see what the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) is up against when trying to make up his mind on what to do about the European People's Party, given the contributions made tonight. I am sorry to hear that the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) is leaving the transport brief so soon after my arrival, and that we will be losing the moderate voice of the Conservative party to Northern Ireland.
	This has been a wide-ranging debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) and the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) took a rather more measured, sensible approach to the subject, by contrast with the slightly paranoid approach of the Opposition party. The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) made some interesting interventions, some of which were so long that I received notes at the Dispatch Box, which normally only happens during a speech. I shall try to address some of the points that have been made, particularly with regard to the UK contribution to the programme. I shall reiterate what I said earlier but perhaps did not make clear enough.
	The development programme is jointly funded by the European Commission and the European Space Agency. The UK is contributing about 17 per cent., or €142 million, directly through the European Space Agency. I wanted to get that on the record.

Hon. Members: No.

Madam Deputy Speaker: I think the Ayes have it.
	 Division deferred till Wednesday 4 July, pursuant to Standing Order  No.  41A (Deferred divisions).

Tom Levitt: For four years before I became a Member of Parliament, I worked as an adviser to local government on how to make mainstream council services accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, of whom there are about 9 million in the UK. My work started well before Parliament passed the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and 10 years before it was extended to cover goods and services.
	Tonight's debate is, however, prompted not by my experience, but by research carried out in shops in Buxton by my constituent, David Law. Mr. Law has a profound hearing loss and wears two powerful hearing aids. His experience in recent months has turned him into a committed campaigner on the issue of hearing induction loops in shops. More of Mr. Law later. Let me explain some of the background.
	There is no precise figure on the total number of people who wear hearing aids. The number of digital hearing aids provided by the national health service is not centrally collected, and some people pay privately for their hearing aids outside the NHS. About 2 million people use hearing aids daily. The unmet demand, however, is massive. There are between 5 and 6 million people who would benefit from wearing a hearing aid. The good news is that the NHS now provides cutting edge digital hearing aids, which until just a few years ago were available only to people who could afford to spend up to £2,000, from a private dispenser.
	Hearing aids alone do not solve every problem for hearing impaired people, especially in noisy environments. Many people benefit from amplified telephones, door bells or other devices linked to their hearing aid. Above all, it is the induction loop, used alongside the hearing aid, that has brought the most widespread benefit. Induction loop systems can greatly help deaf and hard of hearing people who wear a hearing aid, as they can reduce or even cut out background noise. An induction loop therefore ensures that the hearing aid user hears only what he or she wants to hear.
	Some deaf and hard of hearing people use loops in their homes, to hear their television or telephone better. Induction loops are now widely used in theatres, cinemas and places of worship to help people better understand performances and services. Closer to home, many Members of Parliament and the public find the induction loop systems in this Chamber and in our Committee Rooms to be of immense benefit.
	An induction loop is simply a cable that goes round a specific listening area. The area can be as small as a single listener at an underground station ticket office, for example, or as vast as a theatre auditorium. The system can be fixed or mobile. An electric current is fed to the loop by an amplifier, and the signal is generated by a source of sound. That sound can be from a sound system, a TV set or any microphone placed in front of a person who is speaking. The resultant current in the loop produces a magnetic field that simulates the sound. A hearing aid set to its "T" position can pick up that magnetic field, if it is within loop. Most hearing aids, and all hearing aids that are provided by the NHS, have that "T" position.
	Induction loops involve relatively straightforward technology. They are not hugely expensive, and every hearing aid user can benefit from them, if their hearing aid is compatible. However, despite all those promising factors, all too often too few hearing aid users benefit from induction loops in commercial and public premises. For a start, induction loops are often not advertised properly. Poor signage is a very common problem. That is fundamental, because if a hearing aid user does not know that the induction loop is present, they will not switch their hearing aid to the "T" position. The coverage of an induction loop needs to be displayed, and if there is no sign indicating its availability, it is obviously impossible to work out where the loop is.
	David Law surveyed the shops in the main shopping areas of Buxton. He confined his research to those which advertised the presence of an induction loop through the universal symbol—a white ear shape and the letter "T" against a maroon background. These are some examples of what he was told: "Yes, we have a loop system, but you have to ask us to switch it on for you"; "Yes, we have a loop system, but it hasn't worked for ages"; "Yes, we have a loop system, but the person who knows about it isn't here today"; "Yes, we have a loop system, but no one on the staff knows how to use it, or how to tell whether it is working or not"; or even "No, we don't have a loop system any more, even though the sign on the door still says that we have." Unfortunately, he found precious few examples where people said, "Yes, we have a loop system, it is permanently switched on, regularly tested and all our staff know how to use it. Welcome!"
	When he wrote to the stores in question, Mr. Law invariably found that the regional managers who replied to his letters were more aware of the importance of loop systems than shop workers and managers. In some cases, the replies directly contradicted what he had been told: "All our staff are aware of the loop system and have been trained to use it"; "The loop system is regularly tested and is in full working order"; or, more helpfully, "Thank you for drawing this to our attention. The problem with the loop system has been addressed, and it is now in full working order."
	My research, which I conducted 12 years ago with local authorities, showed an alarming use of inappropriate technology. In one case, users of the induction loop fitted at a council's housing department customer services counter could be heard by hearing aid users throughout the whole building, as the device was many times too powerful for its designated use. As a result, hearing aid users in other parts of the building could not use their local loop systems without interference, because the council had paid well over the odds for a device of a far higher specification than was needed.
	Those problems were also highlighted in a national study of the retail sector in 1998 by the Grass Roots Group, a mystery shopping organisation. In its report, "The Challenge of Disability", it found that less than a third of the outlets that it visited in the financial and high street market sectors had induction loops at the customer service desks, but even when induction loops were in place, they were often of little benefit. Of the induction loop systems tested by deaf and hard of hearing people, 61 per cent. in shops were found not to be working properly. In the past nine years, I recognise that many large retailers and the main banks and building societies have invested heavily in the provision of induction loops, often in response to the full implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act 2004, but have they invested well if the facility is not being used? The Act requires providers of goods and services to make reasonable adjustments to provide those goods and services to people with disabilities in a manner equivalent to that provided to others. From Mr. Law's research and from discussing the matter with organisations such as RNID, of which I was a trustee for several years, I believe that probably little, if any, improvement has taken place in the performance of induction loops over those years. For example, a recent survey of London Underground ticket offices found that fewer than half the loop systems at ticket offices were fully functional.
	In taking matters forward, I want to set out several simple steps by which the retail sector could dramatically improve access to goods and services for almost 2 million people. First, induction loops are only part, albeit a vital one, of what we might call the communications solution. Staff need to know what an induction loop is, what benefits it can bring and, most fundamentally, how it can be turned on.
	Secondly, induction loops must be regularly tested and maintained, in the same way as a security or fire alarm system would be. It is not acceptable for retailers to assume that their induction loops are working up until the time that they receive a complaint from a customer. Relying on customers to complain is not an acceptable testing method, not least because many people with hearing impairments do not have the confidence to complain; they will assume that their hearing aid is not working rather than the loop system. Testing of induction loops is vital and should preferably be carried out once a month. Loop listeners, which replicate a hearing aid set to the "T" position, are inexpensive and easy to use.
	Thirdly, shops and service providers must recognise that not every hearing aid user will understand the benefits of an induction loop. Sadly, too many new hearing aid users come away from their visit to the audiologist without an essential knowledge of these systems. Fourthly, there should always be clear signage indicating the existence of each and every induction loop. Fifthly, different retail situations suit different types of induction loops. Expert advice should always be sought when installing loops to British standard BS 7594.
	I hope that every retailer, however large or small, will take more seriously the needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. It is not often that the retail sector has the opportunity dramatically to improve its customer service to 2 million people at such relatively little cost. For the smallest retail premises, just one mobile induction loop and a listening device together will cost under £200. Such an investment could make a dramatic improvement in access, reflected in a dramatic improvement in sales. For larger premises, the real challenge is not so much the necessity to provide the induction loops, although in some cases it clearly is, but instead to ensure that all their staff properly understand how they work and how to maintain them. That is a far from onerous task—it is just a requirement to have clear policies and procedures that staff are expected to follow. Making good use of existing equipment is not just the right thing to do—it is good business.
	In summary, if, where the installation of an induction loop is a reasonable adjustment to make—I can think of very few customer interfaces where it would not be—will my hon. Friend the Minister ensure that standards of installation, staff training, customer awareness, testing and maintenance are high enough to ensure that the aim of the 2004 Act is achieved in respect of equal access to goods and services for people who use hearing aids? I hope that the retail sector will not turn a deaf ear to the needs of millions of hearing impaired customers and will not pay lip service to lip readers—but that is another story.

Anne McGuire: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) on securing the debate on hearing loops, which, as we have heard, play a valuable role in enabling hearing-impaired people to gain access to goods and services. Through the debate, my hon. Friend helps raise the profile in the House and beyond of the exclusion that deaf and hard-of-hearing people can face. I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the debate and set out the Government's commitment to overcoming the barriers that hearing-impaired people face. I also hope to show the way in which we are fulfilling that commitment.
	First, let me pay tribute to my hon. Friend's personal record of supporting deaf and hearing-impaired people. In positions such as trusteeship of the Royal National Institute for Deaf People and membership of the all-party parliamentary group on deafness, he has supported hearing-impaired people to achieve their goal of full and active participation in our society. By promoting the RNID's telephone hearing check, he highlighted the impact of deafness and the importance of its early detection.
	The debate is further evidence of my hon. Friend's commitment to championing the inclusion of those people who regard themselves as severely or profoundly deaf. The RNID's figures show that there are 700,000 such adults in the UK. My hon. Friend mentioned his constituent, Mr. David Law, who conducted a survey in Buxton. Like many of those 700,000 adults, he faces significant barriers in his everyday life. Those people also experience the isolation that comes from having an impairment that hinders communication with others, yet they have a right to enjoy the activities that non-disabled people take for granted.
	In the debate, we are considering many hundreds of thousands of severely hearing-impaired people, such as Mr. Law, who have a right to a full and fulfilling life. The Government are achieving that for all disabled people. We promised to establish a comprehensive set of civil rights for disabled people and, as my hon. Friend knows, we achieved that by significantly extending and improving the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, to which he referred, culminating in the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, which gained support from hon. Members of all parties. The Disability Discrimination Act, as amended and strengthened by the Government, requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments to overcome the barriers that disabled people face when accessing goods and services. Those wide-ranging duties mean that the service provider may have to consider a variety of adjustments for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
	My hon. Friend has focused on hearing loops in shops, but I am pleased that he mentioned the hearing loop on the parliamentary estate. Like him, I know from colleagues that it is a first-class system, which benefits Members, staff and visitors to the Palace of Westminster. I fully acknowledge that hearing loops are an important technological development and that they pull down barriers for disabled people. They help many hearing-impaired people access services, and I support their use whenever possible.
	My hon. Friend made some valuable points about the use of hearing loops. Clearly, as he said, it is not sufficient simply to install a hearing loop. Retailers and other service providers must also ensure that customers are aware that the loop is available, that staff are fully trained in its use and that, as he said, it is maintained in full working order. I have some personal experience of that. For a meeting with constituents I got the portable hearing loop from my local authority, only to find, much to my embarrassment, that it did not work on that occasion. I assure my hon. Friend that such factors are recognised in the way in which the duty of reasonable adjustment operates. That is made clear in the code of practice that the Disability Rights Commission published. The code provides practical guidance and advice for service providers on how to fulfil the duty of reasonable adjustment.
	The code also has statutory status. That means that a court that is considering a claim of discrimination in accessing goods and services has to take account of any parts of the code that are relevant to the case. The code is relevant to many points that my hon. Friend made. For example, it explains that training employees is an important factor in providing reasonable adjustments. Paragraph 6.12 makes it clear that staff
	"should know how to provide an auxiliary service and how to use any auxiliary aids that the service provider offers... Providing such training may help to avoid a finding of unlawful discrimination."
	The code also points out that service providers should ensure that any auxiliary aids they provide are carefully chosen and properly maintained. It uses the example of a person who is told that a theatre has a hearing loop, but on the day he or she cannot enjoy the performance because the loop is out of service. Although the theatre provided an auxiliary aid, it failed to check that the loop was working properly. That means that the theatre is unlikely to have taken reasonable steps to enable disabled people to use its services.
	I should point out that the installation of a hearing loop may not be affordable or practical in all cases, in spite of the fact that my hon. Friend quite rightly raised the issue of costs, which are quite insignificant in some respects. However, even if installing a loop is not possible, it does not mean that the service provider should do nothing. Duties under part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act require the service provider to anticipate the range of barriers that a disabled customer might face—and there is almost always something that they can do. We need to build a better understanding among service providers of the variety of hearing impairments and the range of adjustments that they can make. That way, we will encourage service providers to think more creatively about the adjustments that they can put in place and we will further improve access to goods and services for people who are deaf and hard of hearing.
	Of course, the DDA recognises that service providers may not be in a position to make every aspect of their service accessible. Its duty of reasonable adjustment aims to balance the rights of the disabled person and the interests of the service provider. The Act requires service providers to make whatever adjustments are reasonable in the particular circumstances. They need to consider factors such as the cost and practicality of making the adjustment and what resources they have available.
	Service providers need to understand that not all adjustments need to be complicated. Simply training staff to speak slowly, clearly and directly to the customer will help people who can lip-read and communicating by writing things down on a pad will help other deaf people, but that does not mean that a small retailer should ignore the wider options, including whether it would be practical and affordable to provide a hearing loop. Of course, for the larger, well-resourced retailers, reasonable adjustment means that a far greater range of adjustments should be achievable. They should be better placed to include more significant adjustments such as the installation of hearing loops.
	Since introducing the new duties, we have regularly monitored how service providers are responding to them, and I would like to advise my hon. Friend that the position is encouraging. Although we do not have figures specifically on adjustments for deaf people, research published earlier this year showed that the majority of businesses—indeed, nearly 90 per cent—had made or planned adjustments to the provision of their services. There is also increasing evidence on the high street of adjustments such as signs offering assistance to disabled people and signs showing hearing loops in place, although I appreciate my hon. Friend's comment that more establishments with loops could make that more obvious.
	Overall, the evidence shows that service providers are taking a more positive attitude towards serving disabled people, but I am sure my hon. Friend will appreciate and agree that legislation is not enough in itself to achieve a fairer society. Our aim is to stimulate the creation of a society where changes are made because it is the right thing to do for disabled people and not just because the law requires them to do so. Our research findings show that we are moving in that direction. The majority of service providers who had made adjustments said, interestingly, that they would have made at least some of them even if the DDA had not been in place. That links into my hon. Friend's comment about it being good for business.
	We have a long way to go to ensure that service providers automatically design accessible services. In the meantime, we need to encourage service providers to meet their DDA duties. In our most recent campaign, we worked with trade organisations and business intermediaries, because small businesses are the most likely to turn to these sources for business advice. We worked closely with them to boost the expertise and capacity of such organisations to provide advice on DDA issues. We also have information on reasonable adjustments—including adjustments for deaf and hard of hearing people—available on the Department's website. A clear message in our campaigns has been that making adjustments need not be expensive or burdensome. That is borne out by all the research findings. Nearly three quarters of those providers who had made adjustments had found no problem putting them into place.
	The Government alone cannot ensure the effective implementation of the legislation, however. We all have a role to play, and we need to work in partnership with other organisations. I particularly commend organisations such as the Royal National Institute for Deaf People for work in this area. Through its websites, the RNID provides advice on the duties of service providers and the types of reasonable adjustment that may be made.
	Disabled people themselves can improve implementation of the law through enforcement of it. That does not necessarily mean formal enforcement through the courts. That is only meant to be used where other routes fail. Instead, disabled people might want to consider an informal approach. I know from one correspondent how successful such an approach can be. When he drew the attention of a large retailer to the barriers at his local branch, and mentioned the DDA, the company made significant access improvements. Disabled people can also seek advice from the Disability Rights Commission—or, from October, the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights—if they believe that a service provider has discriminated by failing to make a reasonable adjustment.
	I thank my hon. Friend once again for this opportunity to highlight an important issue and to explain the Government's record in promoting equality for disabled people. His constituent, Mr. David Law, deserves a vote of thanks for carrying out the research not only on his own behalf but on behalf of other members of the community in Buxton and elsewhere who suffer from a hearing impairment and find that they cannot participate in the way that non-disabled people can.
	I am confident that we have achieved a strong framework of disability rights to support our aim of enabling hearing-impaired people—indeed, all disabled people—to become full and active members of society. Through highlighting these issues, as my hon. Friend has done, we will continue to work towards achieving our vision that, by 2025, we will have true equality for all disabled people in this country.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at twelve minutes past Eleven o'clock.